Stargirl
by FOUNDinLOVEx3
Summary: Niley. Miley Ray plays a girl called Stargirl. From the day she arrived at Mica High, all the hallaways whisper her name "Stargirl, Stargirl" She captures Nick Jonas' heart with just one smile. PLEASE READ & REVIEW!
1. Meeting Stargirl

Thankyou people who reviewed for me to put this chapter up, means so much :D!

Well here's the first chapter!

Written by Reanne; Enjoy!

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It was the first day of the eleventh grade at Mica High; Nick and Joe were stood, with their backpacks on their backs, outside of the school, waiting for the same old bell to ring so they could go to class.

Nick and Joe's eyes wondered over to the incoming students, some of them were coming on their bikes, others were walking with their friends, smiling, talking about boys or their celebrity crushes.

Then Nick was broken from his gaze as Joe said something to that made his face scrunch in confusion.

"Did you see her?"

Nick turned to face him, wanting to know what he was talking about.

"See who?" He asked.

"Hah!" He craned his neck, scanning the mob. His eyes beamed like he had witnessed something remarkable; it showed on his face. He grinned, still scanning the mob. "You'll know what I mean."

There were hundreds of us, milling about, calling names, pointing to their tanned faces that we haven't seen since summer. The student's interest in each other was never keener than during the fifteen minutes before the first bell of the first day.

Nick, losing his patience, he punched Joe's arm in annoyance. "Who?"

The bell rang.

All the students quickly poured inside. Nick kept hearing the same thing over again. First in homeroom as people were whispering behind him saying "Did you see her?" "You see her?" He was hearing it everywhere! Even in English and Geometry.

Many thoughts were running through Nick's mind.

Who could it be? A new student? A celebrity? Or from back East, where many of us came from? Or one of those summer makeovers, someone who leaves in June looking like a little girl and returns in September as a full-bodied woman, a ten-week miracle?

Nick was in science room, learning about Physics. He couldn't concentrate on what the teacher was teaching the class as all he wanted to know, who was this person was? Then he heard a peculiar name behind him, "Stargirl"

He snapped his head around and turned to the senior, who was slouching behind him. "Stargirl?" Nick said. "What kind of name is that?"

"That's it. Stargirl Ray. She said it in homeroom."

"Stargirl?" Nick repeated.

"Yeah." He nodded.

The bell rang.

He grabbed my school books and quickly put them into my bag, walking out of classroom. He really wanted to know who this Stargirl was. Was she one of those exchange students? Or maybe she came from another country or something?

Whoever she was, He needed to know, now.

It was lunch and Nick walked into the cafeteria but when he walked in.

He saw her.

Stargirl.

Her back was to him but he still had a good look at her. The clothes that she was wearing was out of the ordinary, she wore an off-white dress. The dress was so long, it almost covered her shoes. There were ruffles around the neck and the cuffs on her small wrists. Her hair was graciously long, fell past her shoulders, just past her bottom. Then he saw something was strapped across her back, he thought it was a book bag but as he looked closely it wasn't a book bag. First it looked like a miniature guitar. But after getting a proper look, he found out that it was a ukulele. She was carrying a large canvas bag with a life-size sunflower painted on it.

Silence.

As she walked by the cafeteria was silent.

She stopped at an empty table, laid down her bag, slung the instrument strap over her chair, and sat down. She pulled a sandwich from the bag and began to eat the sandwich.

Half the lunchroom kept staring, half started buzzing, and others was murmuring and pointing their fingers at her.

Nick turned around to Joe, who was grinning. "What'd I tell you?"

Nick nodded, still amazed.

"She's in tenth grade," he said. "I hear she's been home schooled…till now."

"Maybe that explains it," Nick said, turning to look at her.

There was no one sat with her, but at the tables next to hers kids were cramming two to a seat. It looked like she didn't seem to notice. She seemed marooned in a sea of staring, buzzing faces.

Nick turned to Joe, who was grinning again. "You thinking what I'm thinking?" he said.

Nick grinned back and nodded. "Hot Seat."

Hot Seat was their in-school TV show. They had started it the year before. Nick was producer/director; Joe was on-camera host. Each month he interviewed a student. So far, most of them had been honour student types, athletes, model citizens. Noteworthy in the usual ways, but not especially interesting.

Suddenly Joe's eyes widened.

The girl was picking up her ukulele and she was strumming it and started to sing! Strumming away, bobbing her head and shoulders, singing.

"My grandma and your grandma, sitting by the fire. My grandma says to your grandma, "I'm gonna set your flag on fire,"

Again then silence came back.

Then the sound of a single person clapping broke the silence.

His head turned to the direction of the sound and looked.

It was the lunch-line cashier.

And now the girl was standing, slinging her bag over one shoulder and marching among the tables, strumming and singing and strutting and twirling. Like she didn't care about anything else. Heads swung, eyes followed her, mouths hung open. All their facial expressions matched each other.

Disbelief.

"Talking about, Hey now, Hey now, Iko iko an nay,"

When she came by Nick's table, Nick finally got a good look at her face. She wasn't gorgeous, neither she wasn't ugly. Generally, she looked like any of the hundred girls in school, except for two things. One, she wore no makeup, and her eyes were the biggest I had ever seen, like deer's eyes caught in headlights. She flashed me a smile before she twirled past me, her flaring skirt brushing my leg, and marching out of the lunchroom, still singing her song.

From among the tables came three slow claps.

Someone whistled.

Someone yelped.

Joe and Nick stared at each other.

Then Joe held up his hands and framed a marquee in the air. "Hot Seat! Coming Attraction-Stargirl!"

Nick slapped the table, in agreement. "Yes!"

We slammed hands our hands together.

Finally someone who will build our viewers up on Hot Seat.

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What d'ya think?

If you're wondering what the song is, it's iko iko by dixie cups :D

Love that song, keep on singing to my friends in class, there like stfu. But i still carry on :')

5+ reviews


	2. She's not real!

The next day at school, Nick and Joe was still talking about their show 'Hot Seat' thinking about what they would do with Stargirl but was interrupted as the saw a girl holding court and the doors of the schools, blocking kids from getting in.

Selena Russo was ranting about the girl Stargirl who came to her school yesterday. She was disgusted by her; she was the centre of the attention, something that she did not like **at all.**

"That girl _Stargirl___is not real." She sneered the word 'Stargirl'. "You know! This is a scam! She just probably one of those actresses' of the prank TV shows!" She shouted as others came into the crowds.

"Who's scamming us?"

"The administration. The _principal_. Who else? Who cares?" She scoffed, flipping her long brown locks over her shoulders, in frustration at the absurdity of the question.

A hand flashed in the air.

"Why?"

"School spirit," She spat back. "They think this place was too dead last year. They think if they plant some nutcase in with the students-"

"Like they plant narcs in schools!" Someone else shouted.

Selena glared at the speaker, ignoring what they said and then continued, "-some nutcase who stirs things up, then maybe all the little students will go to a game once in a while or join a club."

"Instead of making out in the library!" chimed another voice. And everybody laughed and the bell rang and we went in.

Though Selena's theory spread throughout the school and was accepted immediately.

"You think Selena's right?" Joe asked me, going through his locker. "Stargirl's a plant?"

Nick snickered at what he said. "Listen to yourself Joe." Grabbing some of his school books for his next lesson.

He spread his arms, in confusion, holding his books in one arm. "What?"

"This is Mica Area High School," Nick reminded him. "It's not a CIA operation."

"Maybe not," He shrugged. "But I hope Selena's right."

"Why would you hope that? If she's not a real student, we can't have her on Hot Seat." Nick said, looking at him.

Joe wagged his head and grinned and wrapped his arm around my shoulder, bringing me close. "As usual, _Mr. Director_, you fail to see the whole picture. Think about it, we could use the show to expose her. Can't you see it?" He did the marquee thing with his hands again. "Hot Seat Uncovers Faculty Hoax!"

Nick stared at him, after a while, he got what he meant. "You want her to be a fake, don't you?"

He grinned ear to ear, nodding immediately. "Absolutely! Our ratings will go sky-high!"

Though, Nick had to admit, the more he saw of her, the easier it was to believe she was a plant, a joke, anything but real.

On that second day, she wore bright-red baggy shorts with a bib and shoulder straps-overall shorts. Her brown locks were pulled back into twin plaited pigtails, each tied with a bright-red ribbon. A rouge smudge applied each cheek of her face, and even dabbed some oversized freckles on her face. She looked like Little Bo Peep.

At lunch, Stargirl was alone again at her table. As before, when she finished eating, she took up her ukulele. But this time she didn't play. She got up and started walking among the tables. She stared at us.

She stared at one face, then another and another. The kind of bold, I'm-looking-at-you stare you almost never get from people, especially strangers. She appeared to be looking for someone, and the whole lunchroom had become very uncomfortable.

As she approached our table, Nick thought: What if she's looking for me? The thought terrified me. As he saw her approaching closer Nick turned from her and looked at Joe.

Nick watched him grin goofily up at her and wiggle his fingers at her and whispered, "Hi, Stargirl."

Nick didn't hear an answer but was intensely aware of her passing behind his chair.

She stopped two tables away. She was smiling at a pudding-bodied senior named Alan Ferko.

The lunchroom was dead silent.

She started strumming the ukulele and started to sing "Happy Birthday." When she came to his name she didn't sing just his first name, but his full name: "Happy Birthday, dear Alan Fer-kooooh"

Alan Ferko's face flushed red as Stagirl's ribbons in her hair. There was a flurry of whistles and hoots, more for Alan Ferko's sake.

As Stargirl marched out, Nick eyes moved across the lunchroom and could see Selena across the lunchroom rising from her seat, pointing, saying something Nick could not hear.

"I'll tell you one thing," Kevin said as we joined the mob in the hallways, "she better be fake."

"What do you mean?" Nick asked.

"I mean if she's real, she's in big trouble. How long do you think somebody who's really like that is going to last around here?" Good question.

Mica Area High School-MAHS-was not exactly a hotbed of non conformity. There were individual variants here and there, of course, but within pretty narrow limits we all wore the same clothes, talked the same way, ate the same food, listened to the same music. Even the dorks and nerds had a MAHS stamp on them. If we happened to somehow distinguish ourselves, we quickly snapped back into place, like rubber bands.

Joe was right. It was unthinkable that Stargirl could survive-or at least survive unchanged-among us. But it was also clear that Selena Russo was at least half right: this person calling herself Stargirl may or may not have been a faculty plant for school spirit, but whatever she was, she was not real.

She couldn't be.

Several times in those early weeks of September, she showed up in something outrageous. A 1920s flapper dress. An Indian buckskin. A kimono. One day she wore a denim miniskirt with green stockings, and crawling up one leg was a parade of enamel ladybug and butterfly pins. "Normal" for her was long, floor-brushing pioneer dresses and skirts.

Every few days in the lunchroom she serenaded someone new with "Happy Birthday."

Nick was glad that his birthday was in the summer.

In the hallways, she said hello to perfect strangers. The seniors couldn't believe it. They had never seen a tenth-grader so bold. In class, she was always flapping her hand in the air, asking questions, though the question often had nothing to do with the subject.

One day she asked a question about trolls-in U.S. History class. She made up a song about isosceles triangles. She sang it to her Plane Geometry class. It was called "Three Sides Have I, But Only Two Are Equal." She joined the cross-country team. Our home meets were held on the Mica Country Club golf course. Red flags showed the runners the way to go. In her first meet, out in the middle of the course, she turned left when everyone else turned right. They waited for her at the finish line. She never showed up. She was dismissed from the team.

One day, a girl screamed in the hallway. She had seen a tiny brown face pop up from Stargirl's sunflower canvas bag. It was her pet rat. It came to school in the bag every day.

One morning, during her gym class, they had a rare rainfall. The teacher told everyone to come in. but on the way to the next class, they looked out the windows and saw Stargirl was still, outside. In the rain. Dancing. We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past "weird" and "strange" and "goofy." Her ways knocked us off balance. A single word seemed to hover in the cloudless sky over the school

What? Huh?

Everything she did seem to echo Selena: She's not real… She's not real…

And each night in bed Nick thought of her as the moon came through my window. He could have lowered his shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but he never did.

In that moonlit hour, Nick acquired a sense of the otherness of things. He liked the feeling the moonlight gave him, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on his snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert.

It was during one of these nightmoon times that it came to him that Selena was wrong.

Stargirl was real.

**Im getting lots of alerts but no reviews, please can I have some please?:D3**


	3. Where was she going?

"Did you sign her up?"

"No Joe"

Joe was getting frustrated with Nick lately. Every day he asked him, "Did you sign her up?"

Every day Nick would answer no.

Joe would get frustrated and say "What do you mean, no? Don't you want to sign her up?"

Nick shrugged and told him he wasn't sure.

Joe's face drop and his eyes bugged out nearly out of his socket. "Not sure? How can you not be sure? We high-fived in the lunchroom weeks ago! We were thinking Stargirl miniseries, even. This is a Hot Seat from heaven-."

Again all Nick did was shrugged. "That was then. Now I'm not sure."

Joe looked at Nick, scrunching his eyebrows together. "What's there to be not sure about?"

Nick shrugged.

"Well then," he said, "I'll sign her up." He said walking away.

"You'll have to find another director, then," Nick shouted, making Joe stop in his tracks.

You could almost see the steam rising from his shoulders.

He turned and pointed at him. "You can be a real dick sometimes, Nick." He walked off.

They had been fighting daily, but this was different. Joe and Nick always agreed on _everything_. They had been best friends since they arrived in Arizona. They both came up with the idea when they both had similar career interests so when the conceived Hot Seat together, it was an instant hit. Rapidly, the show became the most popular thing in school.

Though Nick was having some vague feelings about this, but the only one he could identify was a warning.

Leave her alone.

In time "Selena's Hypothesis" what Joe called it, about Stargirl's origins gave way to other theories.

She was trying to get herself discovered for the movies.

She was doing drugs.

She was home schooling gone amok.

She was an alien.

The rat she brought to school was only the tip of the iceberg. She had hundreds of them at home, some as big as cats.

She lived in a ghost town in the desert.

She lived in a bus.

Her parents were circus acrobats.

Her parents were wizards from Hogwarts.

The students would watch her sit down in class and pull from her canvas bag a blue and yellow ruffled curtain that she draped over three sides of her desk. Also she would set out a three-inch clear glass vase and drop into it a white and yellow daisy. She did and undid this in every class she attended, six times a day. Only on Monday mornings was the daisy fresh. By last period the petals were drooping. By Wednesday the petals began to fall, the stem to sag. By Friday the flower hung down over the rim of the waterless vase, its dead stump of a head shedding yellow dust in the pencil groove.

The students started to join Stargirl as she sang "Happy Birthday" to us in the lunchroom. They heard her greet them in the hallways and classrooms, and they wondered how she knew their names and birthdays. Her caught-in-headlights eyes gave her a look of perpetual astonishment, so that they found ourselves turning and looking back over their shoulders, wondering what they were missing. She laughed when there was no joke.

She danced when there was no music.

She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school.

In her answers in class, she often spoke of sea horses and stars, but she did not know what a football was.

She said there was no television in her house.

She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. The kids did not know what to make of her. In their minds they tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.

Joe wasn't the only one. Other students pestered Nick asking him the same thing "Put her on the Hot Seat!"

Nick lied to them by telling them she was only a tenth-grader and you had to be at least a junior to be on Hot Seat. That would buy some time, Nick thought.

Meanwhile, Nick keeping his distance, he observed Stargirl as if she were a bird in an aviary. One day Nick turned a corner and there she was, coming right at him, the long skirt softly rustling, looking straight at Nick, and surrounding him with those eyes. Nick trotted off, turning the other way, taking his seat in his next class; he was a bit shaken and felt his body temperature rise.

Nick wondered if his foolishness showed. Was he being obvious? Was he becoming goofy? The feeling he had when he saw her around the corner had been something like panic.

Then one day after school, Nick decided to follow her, making sure he kept a safe distance. Since she was known not to take a bus, Nick expected the walk to be short.

It wasn't.

They trekked all over Mica, past hundreds of grassless stone-and-cactus front yards, through the Tudorized shopping centre, skirting the electronics business park around which the city had been invented a mere fifteen years before. At one point she pulled a piece of paper from her bag. She consulted it. She seemed to be reading house numbers as she walked along. Abruptly she turned up a driveway, went to the front door, and left something in the mailbox.

Nick waited for her to move off, looking around to see no one on the street. Nick went to the mailbox and pulled out a homemade card. He opened it and on it the card said 'CONGRATULATIONS!' Each capital letter was a different painted colour. Nick also noticed that the card was not signed.

Nick resumed following her. Nick noticed cars pulling into driveways. It was dinnertime.

His parents would be wondering.

Stargirl took the rat from her bag and put it on her shoulder. Riding there, the rat faced backward, its tiny triangular face peeping out of her sand coloured hair. I could not see its beady black eyes, but I guessed it was looking at me. I fancied it was telling her what it saw. I fell farther back. Shadows crossed the streets.

They passed the car wash and the bike shop. We passed the country club golf course, the biggest spread of green grass until the next golf course in the next town. They passed the "Welcome to Mica" sign. They were walking westward. There were us and the highway and the desert and the sun blazing above the Maricopa Mountains. Nick wished he had his sunglasses.

After a while she veered from the highway. Nick hesitated, and then followed. She was walking directly into the setting sun, now a great orange perched atop the mountain crests. For a minute the mountains were the same dusky lavender as her sand-skimming skirt.

With every step the silence grew, as did his sense that she knew-had known all along that she was being followed. Or more, that she was leading him.

She never looked back.

She started strumming her ukulele and singing. Nick could no longer see the rat that was on her shoulder, he imagined it was it her locks of hair. The sun began to lay down behind the mountains.

Where was she going?

In the gathering dusk, the saguaros flung shadows of giants across the pebbled earth. The air was cool on Nick's face. Nick could smell apples in the desert. The Nick heard something-a coyote? Nick thought of rattlesnakes and scorpions.

He stopped and watched her walk on. He stifled an impulse to call after her, to warn her…of what?

Then Nick turned and walked, then ran, back to the highway, back home.

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	4. Stargirl was not coming

Here's the next one, thankyou for reading people! means alot!3

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At Mica Area High School, Selena Russo was famous for three things - her mouth, The Hoax, and Justin Bieber.

Her mouth spoke for itself, most often to complain.

The Hoax took place in her sophomore year, when she tried out for cheerleading. Her face, hair, and figure were right enough, and she surely had the mouth-she made the squad easily. Then she stunned everyone by turning it down. She said she just wanted to prove that she could do it. She said she had no intention of complaining and bouncing in front of empty bleachers (which was usually the case).

Anyway, she hated sports.

As for Justin Bieber, he was her boyfriend. Mouth wise, he was her opposite, he seldom opened his. He did not have to, all he had to do was appear. That was his job, to appear. By both girls' and boys' standards, Justin Bieber was gorgeous.

However, he was more-and less-than that.

In terms of achievement, Justin Bieber seemed to be nobody. He played on no sports team, joined no organization, won no awards, earned no A's. He was elected to nothing, honoured for nothing-and yet, though I did not realize this until years later, he was grand marshal of our daily parade.

They did not wake up in the morning and ask their selves, "What will Justin Bieber wear today?" or "How will Justin Bieber act today?" At least, not consciously, but on some level below awareness, that is exactly what they did. Justin Bieber did not go to football and basketball games, and by and large, neither did we. Justin Bieber did not ask questions in class or get worked up over teachers or pep rallies, and neither did we.

Justin Bieber did not much care. Neither did them.

Did Justin create them, or was he simply a reflection of them? Nick didn't know. He knew only that if you peeled off one by one all the layers of the student body, you would have found at the core not the spirit of the school, but Justin Bieber. That's why, in their sophomore year, Nick had recruited Bieber for the Hot Seat.

Joe was surprised.

"Why him?" Joe asked. "What's he ever done?"

What could he say? That Justin was a worthy subject precisely because he did nothing, because he was so monumentally good at doing nothing. Nick had only a vague insight, not the words. Nick just shrugged.

The highlight of that Hot Seat came when Joe asked Justin who was his hero, his role model. It was one of Joe's standard questions.

Justin answered, "GQ."

In the control room, Nick did a double take. Was the sound working right?

"GQ?" Joe repeated dumbly. "Gentleman's Quarterly? The magazine?"

Justin did not look at Joe as his eyes were looking directly at the camera, smugly nodding. He carried on, saying he wanted to become a male model; his ultimate ambition was to be on the cover of GQ. Moreover, right there he posed for the camera giving his signature moves; wink, bite lip and point at the camera. He had the perfect teeth and hair the girl would go crazy about.

That took place towards the end of sophomore year. Nick then thought that Justin would always reign as their grand marshal. How could he have known that Justin would be challenged by an ocean-eyed homeschooler?

Nick's phone was ringing; he picked up his phone and look at the screen. It was Joe. Nick answered the phone and he could tell he was at the football game.

"Quick dude! Hurry! Drop whatever you are doing and get down to the stadium! Now!" Joe was one of the few who went to games. The school kept threatening to drop football because of low attendance. They said the ticket receipts were barely enough to pay electricity to light the field.

Nick jumped in the car and raced to the stadium. He quickly got there and bolted from the truck. He saw Joe at the gate, wind milling his arm, signalling "Hurry!" Nick threw the two-dollar admission at the ticket window and they raced for the field. "See better up here," he said, yanking him into the stands.

It was halftime and the band was on the field, all fourteen of them. Among the students, it was known as "The World's Smallest Standing Band." There were not enough of them to form recognizable letters or shapes-except for a capital "I"-so they did not march much at halftimes of games. They mostly stood in two rows of seven each, plus the student conductor. No majorettes. No colour guard. No flag and rifle girls.

Except this night, Stargirl Ray was on the field with them. As they played, rooted in their places, she pranced around the grass in her bare feet and long lemon-yellow dress. She roamed from goalpost to goalpost. She swirled like a dust devil. She marched stiffly like a wooden soldier. She tootled an imaginary flute. She pogoed into the air and knocked her bare heels together. The cheerleaders gaped from the sidelines. A few people in the stands whistled. The rest, they barely outnumbered the band-sat there with 'What is this?' look on their faces.

The band stopped playing and marched off the field but Stargirl stayed. She was twirling down the forty-yard line when the players returned. They did a minute of warm-up exercises. She joined in doing jumping jacks, belly whomps. The teams lined up for the second half kickoff. The ball perched on the kicking tee. Stargirl was still on the field and the referee noticed and blew his whistle, pointed to her. He flapped his hand for her to go away.

Instead, she dashed for the ball, plucked it off the tee, and danced with it, spinning and hugging it and hoisting it into the air. The players looked at their coaches and coaches looked at the officials. The officials blew their whistles and began converging on her. The sole police officer on duty headed for the field. She punted the ball over the visiting team's bench and ran from the field and out of the stadium. Everyone cheered, the spectators, the cheerleaders, the band, the players, the officials, the parents running the hot dog stand, the policeman, me.

They whistled and stomped their feet on the aluminium bleachers. The cheerleaders stared up in delighted surprise. For the first time, they were hearing something come back from the stands. They did cartwheels, backflips, and even a three-tier pyramid. Old-timers- or as old as timers got in a city as young as Mica-said they had never heard such a racket.

For the next home game, more than a thousand people showed up, everyone but Justin and Selena. There was even a line at the ticket window; the refreshment stand ran out of hot dogs. They had to call another police officer because of the commotion and the cheerleaders were in their glory, they screamed up at the bleachers "GIMME AN E!" The bleachers screamed back, "EEEE!" (They were the Electrons, in honour of the town's electronics heritage.)

The cheerleaders ran through all their routines before the first quarter was over, the band was loud and peppy. The football team even scored a touchdown, in the stands heads kept swinging to the edges of the field, to the entrance, to the streetlamp-lighted darkness behind the stadium. The sense of expectation grew as the first half ended. The band marched smartly onto the field, looking around. The musicians did their program; they even formed a small, lopsided circle, lingering on the field, drawing out their notes, waiting. Finally, reluctantly, they marched to the sideline where the players returned. They kept glancing around as they did their warm-ups. When the referee raised his arm and blew his whistle for the second half to begin, a sense of disappointment fell over the stadium. The cheerleaders' shoulders sagged.

Stargirl was not coming.

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	5. A H Archibald Hapwood Brubaker

**I used some original characters in this =)**

**Carrying on oh yeah, I need to say this, thank you so much everyone who has reviewed, alerted, faved me, it means so much honestly, I'mma try and update faster, it's cus ive got 15 exams in like 4 weeks so I'm revising pretty hard for that, sorry if I don't !**

**Back to the story…**

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On the following Monday, in the lunchroom, all the students had surprised expressions on their faces. Mallory Stillwell, captain of the cheerleading team, was sitting with Stargirl Ray!

She sat with her, ate lunch with her, talked with her even walked out with her! However, by sixth period, the whole school knew, Stargirl Ray was invited to become a cheerleader on the team and she said yes.

Everyone in Phoenix was wondering, would she wear the usual skirt and sweater like everyone else? Would she do the usual cheers? Did all the cheerleaders want this, or was it just the captain's idea?

Or were they jealous of her?

There was a crowd at the cheerleading practice, at least a hundred of the students, stood, watching by the parking lot that day. Their attention was on Stargirl, how she was learning the cheers, watching her jump around in her long pioneer dress. She spent two weeks practicing the routine. Halfway through the second week she wore her uniform: green-trimmed white V-neck cotton sweater, short green and white pleated skirt.

She looked just like the rest of them.

Still, to them, she was not truly a cheerleader, but Stargirl dressed like one. However, she continued to strum her ukulele and sing "Happy Birthday" to people. She still wore long skirts on non-game days and made a home of her school desks. When Halloween arrived, everyone in her homeroom found a candy pumpkin on his or her desk. No one had to ask who did it. By then most of them had decided that they liked having her around, they found themselves looking forward to coming to school, to seeing what bizarre antic she would be up to, she was what the students talk about. She was their entertainment, but at the same time, they held back, because Stargirl was different.

Different.

They had no one to compare her to, no one to measure her against. She was unknown territory. She was unsafe as they were afraid to get too close to her. Nick thought they were all waiting to see the outcome of an event that loomed larger and larger with every passing day.

The next birthday coming up was **Selena Russo's**.

Selena set the stage the day before, in the middle of lunch, she got up from her table and walked over to Stargirl. For half a minute, she just stood behind Stargirl's chair. Everyone was silent, watching the interaction between the two girls, all except for tinklings in the kitchen. Everyone stopped eating except Stargirl, who was eating her sandwich. Moving to the side, Selena stood beside Stargirl, looking at her.

"Hi, I'm Selena Russo," she said.

Stargirl looked up from her sandwich at looked at her; she gave her a smile and said, "I know."

"My birthday is tomorrow."

"I know."

Selena paused, narrowing her eyes, she jabbed her finger in Stargirl's face. "Don't try singing to me, I'm warning you."

Only those at nearby tables heard Stargirl's faint reply. "I won't sing to you."

Selena gave a satisfied smirk and walked off.

From the moment they arrived at school the next day, the atmosphere bristled like cactus paddles. When the bell sounded for first lunch, they leaped for the doors, swarming the food lines as they were racing through their choices and hurrying to their seats. Never had they moved so fast so quietly. At most, they whispered, sat, and ate. They were afraid of that if they made a sound they would miss something.

The Selena entered the lunchroom first, marching, leading her girlfriends like an invading general. In the food line, she smacked items onto her tray, glaring at the cashier. While her friends scanned the crowd for Stargirl, Selena stared ferociously at her sandwich.

Then Justin Bieber came in and sat several tables away, knowing what Selena is like, even he was afraid of her when she was like this. Then Stargirl finally came in, walking straight to the food line, blithely smiling as usual at the cashier. Both she and Selena seemed unaware of each other.

Stargirl ate. Selena ate. They watched and only the clock moved.

A kitchen staffer stuck her head out over the conveyor belt and called, "Trays!"

A voice barked back "Shut up!"

Stargirl finished her lunch, as usual; she stuffed her wrappings into her paper bag, carried the bag to the paper-only can by the tray return window, and dropped it in. She returned to her seat, picking up her ukulele and began strumming and humming. She stood, strolling between the tables, humming, strumming. Three hundred pairs of eyes followed her every movement. She came past Selena Russo's table and kept on walking, right up to the table where Joe and Nick sat with the Hot Seat crew.

She stopped and she sang "Happy Birthday." It was Selena's name at the end of the song, but true to her word of the day before, she did not sing it to Selena. No. She sang it to Nick. She stood at his shoulder and looked down at him, smiling, and singing. Nick did not know whether to look down at his hands or up at her face, so he did some of each, his face was burning.

When she finished, the students burst from their silence with wild applause causing Selena to stomp out of the lunchroom.

Joe looked up at Stargirl and pointed at Nick and said what everyone must have been thinking "Why him?"

Stargirl tilted her head, as if studying him. She grinned mischievously, tugging on his earlobe, "He's cute." And walked off.

Nick was feeling nine ways at once, and they all ended up at the touch of her hand on his ear until Joe reached over and yanked the same earlobe. "This keeps getting more interesting," he said.

"I think it's time to go see Archie."

* * *

After dinner that day, Nick and Joe walked over to Archie's house. A. H. "Archibald Hapwood" Brubaker, he lived in a house full of bones. Jawbones, hipbones, femurs. You name it, there were bones in every room, every closet, on the back porch. Some people have stonecats on their roofs; on his roof, Archie had a skeleton of Monroe, his deceased Siamese.

Archie was not morbid; he was a palaeontologist. The bones were from digs he had done throughout the American West. Many were rightly his, found in his spare time. Others he collected for museums but slipped into his own pocket or knapsack instead. "Better to sit in my refrigerator than disappear in a drawer in some museum basement," he would say.

When he was not digging up old bones, Archie Brubaker was teaching at universities in the East. However, he retired at the age of sixty-five, but when he was sixty-six, his wife, Ada Mae, died. At sixty-seven, he moved himself and his bones west, "to join the other fossils."

Nick and Joe found him, as usual, on the back porch, rocking and reading on his rocking chair. The porch, bathed in the red-gold light of sunset, faced the Maricopas. There was a light Archie's white hair seemed to give off a light of its own.

The moment he saw them, he put down his book. "Students! Welcome!"

"Archie," they said, then turned to greet the great cactus, as visitors was expected to do, they saluted. "Senor Saguaro."

They sat on rockers; his porch was full of them. "So, men," he said, "business or pleasure?"

"Bafflement," Nick said. "There's a new girl in school."

He laughed. "Stargirl."

Joe's eyes popped out. "You know her?"

"Know her?" he said. Archie picked up his pipe and loaded it with cherry sweet tobacco. He always did this when settling in for a long lecture or conversation.

"Good question." He said, lighting the pipe. "Let's say she's been on the porch here quite a few times." White smoke puffed like Apache signals from the corner of his mouth. "I was wondering when you'd start asking questions." He chuckled to himself.

"Bafflement… good word. She is different, isn't she?"

Laughter came out of Nick and Joe's mouth, only they could nod. Only then, Nick realised how much he wanted Archie's confirmation.

"More like another species!" Joe exclaimed.

Archie cocked his head, as if he had just caught the sound of something rare. The pipe stem anchored a wry grin. A sweet scent filled the air about their rocking chairs. He stared at Joe. "On the contrary, she is one of us. Most decidedly. She is us, more than we are us. She is, I think, who we really are. Or were."

Archie talked that way sometimes, in riddles. They didn't always know what he was saying, but they didn't much care, they just wanted to hear more. As the sun dipped below the mountains, it fired a final dart at Archie's flashing eyebrows.

"She's homeschooled, you know. Her mother brought her to me. I guess she wanted a break from playing teacher. One day a week. Four, five-yes, five years now."

Joe pointed. "You created her!"

Archie smiled, puffed. "No, that was done long before me."

"Some people are saying she's some kind of alien sent down here from Alpha Centauri or something," said Joe. He chuckled, but not too convincingly. He half believed it.

Archie's pipe had gone out. He relit it. "She's anything but. She's an earthling if there ever was one."

"So it's not just an act?" said Joe.

"An act? No. If anybody is acting, it's us. She's as real as"-he looked around; he picked up the tiny, wedge like skull of Barney, a 60-millionyear- old Palaeocene rodent, and held it up-"as real as Barney."

"But the name," said Joe, leaning forward. "Is it real?"

"The name?" Archie shrugged. "Every name is real. That's the nature of names. When she first showed up, she called herself Pocket Mouse. Then Mudpie. Then-what?-Hullygully, I believe. Now…"

"Stargirl." The word came out whispery; Nick throat was dry.

Archie looked at Nick. "Whatever strikes her fancy. Maybe that's how names ought to be, heh? Why be stuck with just one your whole life?"

"What about her parents?" said Joe.

"What about them?"

"What do they think?"

Archie shrugged. "I guess they agree."

"What do they do?" Joe said.

"Breathe. Eat. Clip their toenails."

Joe laughed. "You know what I mean. Where do they work?"

"Mrs. Caraway, until a few months ago, was Stargirl's teacher. I understand she also makes costumes for movies."

Joe nudged Nick. "The crazy clothes!"

"Her father, Charles, works"-he smiled at us-"where else?"

"MicaTronics," we said in chorus.

Nick said it with wonder, for he had imagined something more exotic.

Joe said, "So where is she from?"

A natural question in a city as young as Mica. Nearly everybody had been born somewhere else.

Archie's eyebrows went up. "Good question." He took a long pull on the pipe. "Some would say Minnesota, but in her case…" He let out the smoke, his face disappearing in a gray cloud. A sweet haze veiled the sunset: cherries roasting in the Maricopas. He whispered, "Rara avis."

"Archie," said Joe, "you're not making a lot of sense."

Archie laughed, "Do I ever?"

Joe jumped up. "I want to put her on Hot Seat. Dorko Borlock here doesn't want to."

Archie studied Nick through the smoke. Nick thought he saw approval, but when he spoke, he merely said, "Work it out, men."

They talked until dark. They said goodbye to Senor Saguaro.

On our way out, Archie said, more to Nick than to Joe, Nick thought, "You'll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know."

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	6. Don't, Selena!

**Here's the next part :)**

**Enjoy!**

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How did it happen?

How did Stargirl Ray become the most popular person in school?

Was it the cheerleading?

The last football game of the season was her first as a cheerleader. The grandstand was packed: students, parents, alumni. Never had so many people come to a football game to see a cheerleader.

Stargirl did all the regular cheers and routines and more. In fact, she never stopped cheering, while the other girls were taking breaks, she went on jumping and yelling, roaming areas that had always been ignored-the far ends of the grandstand, the spectators behind the goalposts, the snack bar parents-found themselves with their own arm pumping cheerleader.

She ran straight across the fifty-yard line and joined the other team's cheerleaders. The students laughed as the opposite side stood there with their mouths open. She cheered in front of the players' bench but was shooed away by a coach. At halftime she played her ukulele with the band. In the second half she got acrobatic doing cartwheels and back flips. At one point the game was stopped and three zebra-shirted officials ran toward one end zone. She had shinnied up a goalpost, tightrope-walked out to the middle of the crossbar, and was now standing there with her arms raised in a touchdown sign. She was commanded down, to a standing ovation and flashing cameras.

As they filed out afterward, no one mentioned how boring the game itself had been. No one cared that the Electrons had lost again. In his column next day, the sports editor of the Mica Times referred to her as "the best athlete on the field." The students couldn't wait for basketball season.

Was it a Selena Russo backlash?

Several days after the birthday song, Nick was walking down the hallway but stopped as he heard someone shout down the hallway, "Don't!" Nick ran. A crowd was gathered at the top of a stairwell, they were all staring at something. Nick pushed his way through until he stopped at the front when he saw Selena Russo standing at the upper landing, grinning. She was holding Cinnamon, Stargirl's rat, by its tail over the railing, dangling it over the upper landing and the first floor. Stargirl was on the steps below, looking up.

The scene froze. The bell for the next class rang, but nobody moved. Stargirl said nothing, merely looked. The eight toes of Cinnamon's front paws splayed apart, its tiny unblinking eyes were bulging, black as cloves.

Again a voice rang out: "Don't, Selena!"

Suddenly Selena dropped it. Someone screamed, but the rat fell only to the floor at Selena's feet. She sent Stargirl a final sneer and left the scene.

Was it Demi Munroe?

Demi Munroe was a brown-haired ninth-grader who wrote poems in a loose leaf notebook half as big as herself and whose name nobody knew until the day she sat down at Stargirl's table for lunch. Next day the table was full. No longer did Stargirl eat lunch-or walk the hallways or do anything else at school-alone.

Was it them?

Did they change?

Why didn't Selena Russo drop the rat to its death?

Did she see something in their eyes?

Whatever the reason, by the time they returned from Thanksgiving break, it was clear that the change had occurred. Suddenly Stargirl was not dangerous to the students, they rushed to embrace her. Calls of "Stargirl!" flew down the hallways, they couldn't say her name often enough. It tickled them to mention her name to strangers and watch the expressions on their faces.

Girls liked her. Boys liked her. And-most remarkable-the attention came from all kinds of kids: shy mice and princesses, jocks and eggheads.

They honoured her by imitation, a chorus of ukuleles strummed in the lunchroom. Flowers appeared on classroom desks. Dozens of girl dance outside in the rain. The pet shop at the Mica Mall ran out of rats.

The best chance for them to express their admiration came in the first week of December. They were gathered in the auditorium for the annual oratorical contest, sponsored by the Arizona League of Women Voters. The event was open to any high school student who cared to show his or her stuff as a public speaker, having the microphone for seven minutes. They could talk about anything they like. The winner would move on to the district competition.

Usually only four or five students entered the contest at MAHS. That year there were thirteen, including Stargirl. You didn't have to be a judge to see that she was far and away the best. She gave an animated speech-a performance, really-titled "Elf Owl, Call Me by My First Name." Her grey-brown homesteader's dress was the colour of her subject. When she finished, they stomped on the floor and whistled and shouted for more.

While the judges went through the charade of conferring, a film was shown. It was a brief documentary about the previous year's state finals. It featured the winner, a boy from Yuma. The most riveting moments of the film came not during the contest, but during its aftermath. When the boy arrived back at Yuma High, the whole school mobbed him in the parking lot: banners, cheerleaders, band music, confetti, streamers. Pumping his arms in the air, the returning hero rode their shoulders into school.

The film ended, the lights went on, and the judges proclaimed Stargirl was the winner. She would now go on to the district competition in Red Rock, they said. The state finals would be held in Phoenix in April. Again and again they whooped and whistled for her.

Such was the acclamation they gave her in those last weeks of the year. But they also gave something to themselves.

In the Sonoran Desert there are ponds. You could be standing in the middle of one and not know it, because the ponds are usually dry. Nor would you know that inches below your feet, the frogs are sleeping, their heartbeats down to once or twice per minute. They lie dormant and waiting, these mud frogs, for without water their lives are incomplete, they are not fully themselves. For many months they sleep like this within the earth. And then the rain comes, a hundred pairs of eyes pop out of the mud, and the night is filled with hundred voices, calling, across the moonlit water.

It was wonderful to see, wonderful to be in the middle of: they were like mud frogs, awakening all around, awash in tiny attentions, like small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life. For years, the strangers among them had passed sullenly in the hallways; now they looked, they nodded, they smiled. If someone got an A, others celebrated, too. If someone sprained an ankle, others felt the pain. They discovered the colour of each other's eyes.

It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion for rather than against, for their selves. For the dormant mud frogs they had been for so long. Kids whose voices had never been heard before spoke up in class. "Letters to the Editor" filled a whole page of the school newspaper's December edition. More than a hundred students tried out for the Spring Revue. One kid started a camera club. Another wore Hush Puppies instead of sneakers. A plain, timid girl painted her toenails kelly green. A boy showed up with purple hair. None of this was publicly acknowledged. There were no PA announcements, no TV coverage, and no headlines in the Mica Times

MAHS STUDENTS ASTIR

INDIVIDUALITY ERUPTS

But it was there; it was happening. Nick was used to peering through the lens, to framing the picture, and he could see it. He could feel it in himself. He felt lighter, unshackled, as if something he had been carrying had fallen away. But he didn't know what to do about it. There was no direction to his liberation. He had no urge to colour his brown curls or trash his sneakers. So he just enjoyed the feeling and watched the once amorphous student body separate itself into hundreds of individuals. The pronoun "they" itself seemed to crack and drift apart in pieces.

Ironically, as they discovered and distinguished their selves, a new collective came into being-a vitality, a presence, a spirit that had not been there before. It echoed from the rafters in the gym: "GO, ELECTRONS!" It sparkled in the water fountains. At the holiday assembly, the words of the alma mater had wings.

"It's a miracle!" Nick gushed to Archie one day.

He stood on the edge of his back porch. He did not turn. He pulled the pipe slowly from between his lips. He spoke as if to Senor Saguaro or to the blazing mountains beyond.

"Best hope it's not," he said. "The trouble with miracles is, they don't last long."

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	7. We're the Electrons!

**I feel you guys hate me now...sorry! :/**

**I feel this chapter is really long tbh.**

**Carrying on...**

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Soon Nick's resistance to putting Stargirl on Hot Seat seem to vanish as the next this he said to Joe was "Okay," Joe looked at Nick and nodded.

"Okay, let's do it. Schedule her." He started off, but Nick grabbed his arm. "Wait-ask her first."

He laughed. "Right. Like she's gonna say no."

He's right, no one had ever said no to the Hot Seat. Any reluctance to answering personal or embarrassing questions always yielded to the lure of appearing on TV. If anyone could resist that lure, Nick figured it would be Stargirl.

That day after school, Joe came at Nick thumbs-up and grinning, "It's a go! She said yes!" First, Nick was surprised as it didn't fit is impression of her. He didn't know that this was an early glimpse of something he was soon to see much more of: behind the dazzling talents and differentness, she was far more normal than he had realized. Then he was elated, the boys yipped and high-fived and started to see visions of their most popular ever.

This was mid-January; they set a date of February thirteenth, the day before Valentine's. They wanted a full month for the build up. With Nick's resistance now gone, he jumped in with both feet. They planned a promo campaign and got art students to do posters. They jotted down questions for Joe to ask in case the jury ran out-fat chance of that happening, they didn't have to post the usual jury notice: dozens of kids volunteered.

And then things changed again.

In the courtyard of the school stood a five-foot sheet of plywood in the shape of a roadrunner. It was a bulletin board, strictly for student use, always taped and tacked with messages and announcements. One day they found the following computer printout taped to the plywood roadrunner:

"I pledge allegiance to United Turtles of America and to the fruit bats of Borneo, one planet in the Milky Way, incredible, with justice and black bean burritos for all."

Handwritten across the bottom were the words: "This is how she says the Pledge of Allegiance."

No one had to tell them who "she" was. Apparently, she was overheard in homeroom as we said the Pledge each morning.

As far as Nick knew, they were not a particularly patriotic bunch. He didn't hear people saying they were offended. Some thought it was funny. Some giggled and nodded knowingly, as if to say, there she goes again. On the following mornings, more than one kid was heard reciting the new "pledge."

Within days a new story wild fired through the student body. A senior girl, Anna Grisdale, lost her grandfather after a long illness. The funeral took place on a Saturday morning. For a while everything seemed routine, the crowd of people at the church, the line of cars with their headlights on, the smaller group clustered around the grave for the final farewell. After the brief graveside service, the funeral director handed everyone a long-stemmed flower. Upon leaving, each mourner laid his or her flower over the casket. This was when Anna Grisdale first noticed Stargirl.

Through her own tears Anna could see that Stargirl was crying also. She wondered if Stargirl had been at the church as well. Even more, she wondered why Stargirl was there at all. Could she have been friends with her grandfather without Anna's knowing it? Anna's mother asked her who the unfamiliar girl was.

Afterward, the mourners were invited to Anna's house for lunch. About thirty came. There was a buffet of cold cuts and salads and cookies. Stargirl was there, chatting with members of the family but not eating or drinking anything.

Suddenly Anna heard her mother's voice. It was no louder than the others, but it was different. "What are you doing here?"

Sudden stillness and everyone was staring.

They were in front of the picture window. Anna had never seen her mother so angry. Mrs. Grisdale had been very close to her father. They had built an addition to their house so he could live with them.

She glared down at Stargirl. "Answer me."

Stargirl gave no reply. "You didn't even know him, did you?"

Still Stargirl said nothing.

"Did you?"

And then Anna's mother was flinging open the front door and pointing, as if banishing her to the desert. "Leave my house."

Stargirl left.

Danny Pike was nine years old; he loved to ride the bicycle he had gotten for his birthday. One day after school he lost control and ploughed into a mailbox, he broke his leg, but that wasn't the worst of it. A blood clot developed. He was airlifted to Children's Hospital in Phoenix, where he was operated on, for a while it was touch and go, but within a week he was on his way back home.

All this was reported in the Mica Times, as was the celebration when Danny arrived at his home on Pinon Lane. The five-column photo in the Times showed Danny on his father's shoulders, surrounded by a mob of neighbours. In the foreground were a new bike, and a big sign that read 'WELCOME HOME, DANNY'

It wasn't until days later that the front-page photo appeared on the plywood roadrunner, they gathered around to see something they hadn't noticed before. An arrow from a thick red felt-tip marker pointed at one of the tiny faces crowded into the frame. It was the face of a girl, beaming as if Danny Pike were her little brother back from the dead.

It was Stargirl.

And then there was the bike.

The various members of the Pike family, parents, grandparents, etc, all each thought someone else had bought Danny the new bicycle. Several days went by before they discovered to their great surprise that none of them had.

So where did the bike come from? The high-schoolers who heard the story and saw the picture had a pretty good idea. Apparently the Pikes did not. The bike became the focus of a family squabble. Mr. Pike was mad because nobody he asked would admit to buying the bike-and probably because he hadn't done it himself. Mrs. Pike was mad because no way, not for at least one year, would she allow Danny back on wheels.

One night the new, still-unridden bike wound up at the Pikes' front curb with the trash cans. By the time the trash collector came the next day, it was gone. Danny got a BB gun instead.

The Pledge of Allegiance, the Grisdale funeral, the Danny Pike affair these things were noted, but they had no immediate impact on Stargirl's popularity at school. Not so with cheerleading and the boys' basketball season.

During the first quarter of each home game, Stargirl went over to the visitors' section and gave them a cheer, starting with an exaggerated ball-bouncing motion,

"Dribble, Dribble! Sis Boom Bibble! We don't bite! We don't nibble! We just say-" She did a sweeping wave with her hand.

"Howwww-dee, friends!" She used her two thumbs, pointing to her chest.

"We're the Electrons!" She points to them. "Who-are-YYYYYYOU?" She turns her head to side, cupping her ear.

A couple of visiting cheerleaders, maybe a fan or two would call back, "Wildcats!" or "Cougars!" or whatever, but most of them just gaped at her as if to say, Who is this? Some of her fellow cheerleaders were amused, some were mortified.

At that point the only crime Stargirl could have been accused of would be corniness. But she didn't stop there. She cheered whenever the ball went in the basket, regardless of which team shot it. It was the strangest sight: the other team scores, the MAHS crowd sits glumly on their hands while Stargirl, alone, pops up cheering.

At first the other cheerleaders tried to suppress her; it was like trying to calm down a puppy. When they gave her the pleated skirt, they made a cheerleader they never imagined. She did not limit herself to basketball games. She cheered anyone, anything, anytime. She cheered the big things-honours, election winners-but she gave most of her attention to little things.

You never knew when it would happen. Maybe you were a little ninth grade nobody named Eddie. As you're walking down the hall you see a candy wrapper on the floor. You pick it up and throw it in the nearest trash can-and suddenly there she is in front of you, pumping her arms, her brown hair swallowing you whole with those enormous ocean eyes, belting out a cheer she's making up on the spot, something about Eddie, Eddie and the trash can teaming up to wipe out litter. A mob is gathering, clapping hands in rhythm, more eyes on you than all the previous days of your life combined. You feel foolish, exposed, stupid. You want to follow the candy wrapper into the trash can. It's the most painful thing that's ever happened to you. Your brain keeps squirting out a single thought: I'm going to die…I'm going to die…

And so, when she finally finishes, they ask, why don't you? Why don't you just die? Because they're clapping for you, that's why, and whoever heard of dying while they're clapping for you? And they're smiling at you. People who never even saw you before are smiling at you and slapping your back and pumping your hand, and suddenly it seems like the whole world is calling your name, and you're feeling so good you pretty much just float on home from school. And when you go to bed that night, the last thing you see before you zonked out are those eyes, and the last thing on your face is a smile.

Or maybe you showed up at school with really unusual earrings. Or you aced a test. Or broke your arm. Or got your braces off. Or maybe you weren't even a person. Maybe you were a charcoal drawing on the wall done by an art whiz. Or a really neat-looking bug out by the bike rack.

They wagged their heads and agreed what a goofy girl this was, maybe even officially crazy, but they walked away smiling and maybe not saying but all thinking the same thing: it felt good to get credit. And if this had been any other year, things might have just gone on and on like that. But this was the year something unbelievable was happening on the basketball court. This was the year the team was winning. Only winning.

And that changed everything.

Early in the season no one noticed. Except for girls' tennis, they had never had good teams in anything. They expected to lose as they were comfortable with losing. In fact, most of them were oblivious to it, since they didn't even attend the games.

The year before, the basketball Electrons had won only five of twenty six games. This year, they won their fifth game before Christmas. By early January they had won the tenth, and people began to notice that there was still a zero in the loss column.

"UNDEFEATED!" blared a sign on the plywood roadrunner. Some said they were winning by accident. Some said the other teams were simply more rotten than they were. Some thought the sign was a joke. One thing was certain: attendance went up. By the start of February the winning streak had reached sixteen, and there wasn't an empty seat in the gym.

But something even more interesting was happening. Suddenly they were no longer comfortable with losing. In fact, they forgot how to lose. The transformation was stunning in its speed. There was no apprenticeship period, no learning curve. No one had to teach them how to be winners. One day they were bored, indifferent, satisfied losers; the next they were rabid fanatics, stomping in the grandstand, painting their faces green and white, doing the wave as if they had been perfecting it for years.

They fell in love with their team. When they spoke of it, they used the word "we" instead of "they." The leading scorer, Brent Ardsley, seemed to have a golden glow about him as he moved through the school. And the more they loved their team, the more they hated the opposition. They used to envy them; they even applauded them to spite their own hapless teams. Now they detested the opposition and everything about them. They hated their uniforms. They hated their coaches and their fans. They hated them because they were trying to spoil their perfect season. They resented every point scored against them. And how dare they celebrate! They began to boo. It was their first experience as booers, but you'd have thought they were veterans. They booed the other team, they booed the other coach, they booed the other fans, the referees-whatever threatened their perfect season, and they booed it.

They even booed the scoreboard; they hated games that went down to the wire. The suspense they hated that but they loved games that were decided in the first five minutes. They wanted more than victories, they wanted massacres. The only score they would have been totally happy with would have been 100 to 0.

And right there in the middle of it all, in the midst of this perfect season mania, was Stargirl, popping up whenever the ball went through the net, no matter which team scored, cheering everything and everybody. It was sometime in January when calls started flying from the stands: "Siddown!" Then came the boos. She didn't seem to notice.

She did not seem to notice.

Of all the unusual features of Stargirl, this struck Nick as the most remarkable. Bad things did not stick to her. Correction: her bad things did not stick to her. Their bad things stuck very much to her. If they were hurt, if they were unhappy or otherwise victimized by life, she seemed to know about it, and to care, as soon as they did. But bad things falling on her-unkind words, nasty stares, foot blisters-she seemed unaware of. Nick never saw her look in a mirror, never heard her complain. All of her feelings, all of her attentions flowed outward. She had no ego. The nineteenth game of the basketball season was played at Red Rock. In previous years cheerleaders had outnumbered Mica fans at away games. Not now. The convoy rolling across the desert that evening stretched for a couple of miles. By the time they were seated, there was barely room for the home-team fans.

It was the worst slaughter of the year. Red Rock was helpless. By the start of the fourth quarter they were ahead, 78 to 29. The coach put in the subs. They booed but they smelled a hundred points. They wanted blood. The coach put the starters back in. As they howled and thundered in the stands, Stargirl got up and walked from the gym. Those of them who noticed assumed she was going to the rest room. Nick kept glancing toward the exit. She never returned. With five seconds left in the game, the Electrons scored the hundredth point. They went nuts. Stargirl had been outside the whole time, chatting with the bus driver. The other cheerleaders asked her why she left. She said she felt sorry for the Red Rock players. She felt her cheering was only making the massacre worse.

"Such games were no fun," she said.

"Your job isn't to have fun," They told her, "Your job is to cheer for Mica High no matter what." Stargirl just stared at them.

The team and the cheerleaders rode the same bus. When the players came out from the locker room, the cheerleaders told them what had happened. They devised a trick. They told Stargirl that someone had forgotten something in the gym, and would she please go get it. With Stargirl gone, they told the bus driver everyone was aboard, and the bus made the two-hour return trip without her.

A Red Rock custodian drove her home that night. Next day in school, the cheerleaders told her it was all a big misunderstanding and acted as if they were sorry. She believed them.

The next day was February thirteenth. The Hot Seat.

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	8. Hot Seat Show

This is how Hot Seat went.

It took place in the communications centre studio, there were two chairs on stage: the infamous Hot Seat itself-painted red with flames running up the legs-and an ordinary chair for the host, Joe. Off to the side were two rows of six chairs each, the second row higher than the first.

This was where the jury sat.

It was a jury in name only; the twelve members did not vote or render a verdict. Their job was to ask questions, to give the Hot Seat its heat: ticklish questions, embarrassing questions, nosy questions. But not mean or hurtful questions. The idea was to make the subject squirm, not roast.

In the spirit of mock inquisition, they called the subject the "victim." And why would anyone want to be the victim? The lure of TV, the chance to confess-or lie- before a camera and before peers instead of parents. But Nick doubted the usual reasons applied to Stargirl.

There were three cameras, one for the stage, one for the jury, and Chad. Chad was the handheld close-up camera. According to Mr. Robineau, their faculty advisor, a student named Chad once begged him to be a close-up camera kid so Mr. Robineau gave him a tryout, but was so skinny he practically collapsed under the camera. The job went to someone else and Chad went to the weight room. By the following year Cad had muscles, and the camera was like nothing on his shoulder. He got the job, and he was brilliant at it. He gave the camera his own name. "We are one," he said. When he graduated, his name stayed behind, and from then on the close-up camera and its operator were a unit called Chad.

The host and the victim were each fitted with a thimble-size clip-on mike; the jury passed around a hand mike. Opposite the stage was the glassed-in control room, sound-insulated from the rest of the studio. That's where Nick worked, wearing his headset, watching the monitors, directing the shots. He stood at the shoulder of the technical director, or TD. He sat at a rack of buttons, punching up the shots Nick ordered. Also in the control room were the graphics and audio people. Mr. Robineau was there as faculty overseer, but basically the students worked everything.

Joe's job was to get things started: intro the victim, ask a few opening questions, stir things up if the jury was slow. Usually the jury was on the ball. Typical questions: "Does it bother you that you're so short?" "Is it true that you like so-and-so?" "Do you wish you were good-looking?" "How often do you take a shower?" It almost always added up to entertainment. At the end of the half hour, as they cued credits and music, there was always a good feeling in the air, and everyone-victim, jury members, studio crew-mingled and became students again.

They filmed the shows after school, then broadcast them that nightprime time-on local cable. About ten thousand homes. Their own surveys said at least fifty percent of the student body watched any given show. They outdrew most of the hot sitcoms. They expected to top ninety percent for the Stargirl show.

But Nick had a secret. Nick wished no one would watch.

In the month since they had scheduled the show, Stargirl's popularity had dropped out of sight. Gone were ukuleles from the lunchroom and more and more kids saw her cheerleading behaviour as undermining the basketball team and its perfect record. Nick was afraid the boos for her might spread from the court to the studio. Nick was afraid the show might turn ugly.

When Stargirl came in that day after school, Joe gave her the usual briefing while Mr. Robineau and Nick checked out the equipment. As the jury members straggled in, they were not clowning around or tap dancing on the stage as jurors usually did. They went right to their seats. Stargirl was the one tap-dancing and mugging for the cameras with Cinnamon the rat licking her nose. Joe was cracking up, but the faces of the jurors were grim. One of them was Selena Russo. Nick's bad feeling got worse.

Nick retreated to the control room and shut the door, checking communications with the cameras. They were ready. Joe and Stargirl took their seats. Nick took one last look through the plate glass that separated the set from the control room. For the next half hour Nick would see the world through four monitors. "Okay, everybody," Nick announced, "here we go." He cut the studio mike. He looked over my control-room mates. "We all set?" Everyone nodded.

Just then Stargirl lifted one of Cinnamon's front paws and waved it at the control room and said in a squeaky voice, "Hi, Nick."

Nick froze. He came unravelled. Nick didn't know she knew his name. He just stood there like a dummy. Finally he waggled his fingers at the rat and mouthed the words "Hi, Cinnamon," although they couldn't hear him on the other side of the glass.

Nick took a deep breath. "Okay, ready music, ready intro." Nick paused. "Music, intro."

This was the moment Nick lived for, launching the show. He was the director, the maestro, he called the shots. On the monitors before him, Nick watched the program unfold according to his commands. But on this day the thrill was missing as he felt only a dark dread snaking along the cables.

"Greetings…and welcome to Hot Seat…"

Joe went through the opening spiel. Joe loved to be on camera. He was ideal for a show like this, which made good use of his smirky grin and arching, Did-I-really-hear-you-say-that? eyebrows. He turned to Stargirl. Then, impromptu, he reached out and stroked the nose of Cinnamon, who was perched on Stargirl's shoulder. "Want to hold him?" she said.

Joe gave the camera a 'Should-I look'. "Sure," he said.

"Ready, Chad, rat," Nick said into my headset mike.

"Ready" was always first in the command sequence.

Chad zoomed in.

"Chad."

TD punched up Chad, the camera followed Cinnamon from Stargirl's hands to Joe's. No sooner was the rat in Joe's lap than it scampered up his chest and darted between two buttons into his shirt.

Joe yipped and squirmed. "It scratches!"

"He has fingernails," Stargirl said calmly. "He won't hurt you."

Chad nailed Cinnamon poking his head out from between the two buttons. Mr. Robineau stuck a thumbs-up in front of my face.

Joe gave the camera his Ain't-I-something face. He turned again to Stargirl. "You know, ever since you showed up at school this year, we've been wanting to put you on the Hot Seat."

Stargirl stared at him. She turned to the live camera. Her eyes were growing wider…

Something was happening.

…and wider…

"Chad!" Nick barked.

Chad moved in, crouching, giving it a little upshot. Terrific.

"Closer, closer," Nick said.

Stargirl's wonderstruck eyes practically filled the screen. Nick checked the long-shot monitor. She was frozen, rigid, as if electrified to the chair.

Someone smacked Nick's shoulder, he turned. Mr. Robineau was laughing, saying something. Nick lifted one earphone. "She's joking," he repeated.

And suddenly Nick saw that Stagirl was taking "Hot Seat" literally. She was milking it for all it was worth, and judging from the blank stares of Joe and the jury, Mr. Robineau and Nick were the only ones who got the joke.

Stargirl's hands were rising now from the arms of the Hot Seat…

"Ready one," Nick called. "One!"

Camera One, not there at first but getting it now, the long shot, nailing her as her hands came off the chair arms, fingers spread wide, you could almost see her fingertips smoking…

Hold it, Nick prayed, hold it…

…as her horrified eyes swung down over the side of the chair, the Hot Seat, saw the painted flames…

"EEEEEEEEEEEEYIKES!"

Her scream bent instrument dials like palms in a hurricane, the rat leaped from Joe's shirt. The TV image quaked as my Camera One man flinched, but he recovered and caught her standing now on the front edge of the stage, bending over with her rear end in the camera, flapping her hand behind her, fanning her smoking fanny.

Finally Joe got it. He went nuts.

"One, pull back, get Joe in it. Ready…One."

Joe was doubled up, tipping out of his chair, on his knees on the stage. His laughter flooded the control room. The rat ran over his hands and hopped down the single stage step…

"The rat!" Nick yelled. "Two, get the rat!"

But Two couldn't get the rat because the rat was nosing around Two's feet and Two was bolting from his camera.

"Chad, rat!"

Chad dived, he was flat on the floor, feeding the live screen a brilliant shot of the rat heading over to the jury, the jury members scrambling, taking off, and climbing onto their seats.

Forget the "Readys"; things were happening too fast. The cameras were dancing, feeding the monitors. Nick barked commands. TD was punching his button rack like some hard-rock keyboarder.

Stargirl's pantomime remains the best Nick has ever seen. Mr. Robineau kept squeezing my shoulder. As he said later, it was the greatest moment in Hot Seat history.

But because of what followed, no audience would ever see it.

In less than a minute, everything returned to normal. Stargirl retrieved Cinnamon and sat back coolly in the Hot Seat as if nothing had happened. Joe's eyes twinkled. He was squirming. He couldn't wait to dig into the interview. Neither could the jury, but their eyes were not twinkling.

Joe forced himself to look serious. "So, your name. Stargirl. It's pretty unusual."

Stargirl gave him a blank look.

Joe was flustered. "Isn't it?" he said.

Stargirl shrugged. "Not to me."

She's putting him on, Nick thought. "Chad," Nick said into my mike, "stay tight on her face."

A voice was heard dimly off-camera. Joe turned. A jury member had spoken. "Jury mike up," I said. "Ready Two." The mike was passed to Harper Stone **(Jennifer Stone). **"Two."

The mike looked like a black ice cream cone before Jennifer's face.

Her voice wasn't pleasant. "What was wrong with the name your parents gave you?"

Stargirl turned slowly to Jennifer. She smiled. "Nothing. It was a good name."

"What was it?"

"Miley."

"So why did you drop it?"

"Because I didn't feel like Miley anymore."

"So you just threw out Miley and named yourself Stargirl."

"No." Still smiling.

"No?"

"Pocket Mouse."

Twelve pairs of eyes boggled.

"What?"

"I named myself Pocket Mouse," Stargirl said breezily. "Then Mudpie. Then Hullygully. Then Stargirl."

Donny Adamson snatched the mike from Harper. "So what's it gonna be next? Dog shit?"

Uh-oh, I thought, here we go.

Joe jumped in. "So…you change your name whenever you get tired of it?"

"Whenever it doesn't fit anymore. I'm not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn, I outgrow it, I change it."

"So why Stargirl?"

"Oh, I don't know." She petted Cinnamon's nose with her fingertip. "I was walking in the desert one night, looking up at the sky-like," she chuckled, "how can you not look at the sky!-and it just sort of came to me, fell onto me."

Joe looked up from his sheet of prepared questions. "So what do your parents think? Are they sad you didn't keep Miley?"

"No. It was almost their idea. When I started calling myself Pocket Mouse when I was little, they called me that, too. And we just never went back."

Another distant voice from the jury.

Nick tapped the soundman. "Jury mike. And keep all mikes open." Nick hated to do it.

It was Justin Henrie. "I said, do you love your country?"

"Yes," she answered briskly. "Do you love yours?"

Henrie ignored her question. "Why don't you say the Pledge of Allegiance right?"

She smiled. "Sounds right to me."

"Sounds like you're a traitor to me."

Jurors were only supposed to ask questions, not make statements.

A hand reached into the picture and grabbed the mike from Henrie.

Chelsea Malone's angry face appeared on Camera Two. "Why do you cheer for the other team?"

Stargirl seemed to be thinking it over. "I guess because I'm a cheerleader."

"You're not just a cheerleader, you dumb freak"- Chelsea Malone was snarling into the mike-"you're supposed to be our cheerleader. A **Mica** cheerleader."

Nick glanced at Mr. Robineau, he was turned away from the monitors and he was staring straight at the set through the control room window.

Stargirl was leaning forward, looking earnestly at Chelsea Malone, her voice small as a little girl's. "When the other team scores a point and you see how happy it makes all their fans, doesn't it make you happy, too?"

Chelsea growled, "No."

"Doesn't it make you want to join in?"

"No."

"Don't you ever want the other team to be happy, too?"

"No."

Stargirl seemed genuinely surprised. "You don't always want to be the winner…do you?"

Chelsea scowled at her, jutted out her jaw. "Yes. Yes, I do. Yes. I always want to be the winner. That's what I do. I root for us to win. That's what we all do." She swept her arm around the set. "**We** root for Mica." She jabbed her finger at the stage. "Who do you root for?"

Stargirl hesitated, and then she smiled and threw out her arms. "I root for everybody!"

Joe-to the rescue, thankfully-clapped his hands. "Hey-how about this? Maybe it should be official. Maybe one person in the whole district should be appointed to be on"-he waved his arm-"everybody's side!"

Stargirl reached over and slapped Joe's knee. "She could wear every school's letter on her sweater!"

Joe laughed. "She'd have to be big as a house!"

Stargirl slapped her own knee. "Then no letter at all. That's even better." She looked into the camera; she swiped at the space before her.

"Out with letters!"

"Cheerleader-at-large!"

"Everybody's cheerleader!"

Joe sat at attention, placed his hand over his heart. "With liberty and justice…and a cheerleader for all."

Henrie snarled into the jury mike: "And a nut roll for all."

Joe wagged his finger. "That's a no-no," he scolded. "No statements from the jury. Questions only."

Taylor Johnson snatched the mike. "Okay, here's a question. Why did you quit homeschooling?"

Stargirl's face became serious. "I wanted to make friends."

"Well, you sure have a funny way of showing it, making the whole school mad at you."

Nick wished he had never given in to Hot-Seating Stargirl.

Stargirl just stared. Chad filled the screen with her face.

"Gimme-" It was Jade West, reaching for the mike. "And out of school, too. You meddle into everybody's business. You stick your nose in, whether you're invited or not. Why do you do that?"

Stargirl had no reply; her usual impish expression was gone. She looked at Harper. She looked at the camera, as if trying to find an answer in the lens. Then she was looking away, looking at the control room. Nick took his eyes from the monitor and for a second he thought they met hers at the control room window.

Nick had been wondering when Selena Russo would speak up. Now she did. "I'm gonna tell you something, girl. You're goofy. You're crazy." Selena was standing, jabbing her finger at Stargirl, chewing on the mike. "You must've come from Mars or something…"

Joe raised a timid hand.

"And don't you tell me 'no statements,' Joe. Where'd you come from, Mars or something? There, now it's a question. Why don't you go back to where you came from? There's another question."

Stargirl's eyes filled the camera. "Don't cry," Nick prayed.

There was no stopping Selena. "You want to cheer for other schools? Fine! Go there! Don't come to my school. Get outta my school!"

Other hands were snatching at the mike.

"I know what your problem is. All this weird stuff you do? It's just to get attention."

"It's to get a boyfriend!"

The jurors laughed. They were a mob, their hands fighting to grab at the mike.

Joe looked anxiously at Nick but he couldn't do anything. With all the buttons and switches at his command, he was helpless to change anything on the other side of the glass.

"I got a simple question for you. What's the matter with you? Huh? Huh?"

"Why can't you be normal?"

"Why do you wanna be so different?"

"Yeah-is something wrong with us, you gotta be so different?"

"Why don't you wear makeup?"

They were all standing now, jabbing, jutting, shouting, whether they had the mike or not.

"You don't like us, do you? Do you?"

Mr. Robineau flipped the master toggle on the console. "That's it," he said.

Nick flipped the studio sound switch. "That's it. Show's over."

But the jury went on shouting at Stargirl...

* * *

**That was pretty intense all of them ganging up on her /:**

**teencyruslovato - change my username on twitter, omg Victoria Justice replied to me aswell, i were so happy :)**

**REVIEW PLEASE, LOVE YOUU! :3**


	9. NOOOOO!

**Sorry it's late guys, I'm gonna the next part tomorrow just cus I love you =]**

* * *

This was the start of a period that blurs as Nick tries to recall it. Incidents seem to cascade and merge. Events become feelings, feelings become events. Head and heart are contrary historians.

The Hot Seat session was never aired as the tape was destroyed by Mr. Robineau . Of course, that didn't stop every moment of it from being reported. In fact, most of the students knew about it by the time school opened next day.

What Nick recalled then, when the last detail had been spilled, is a period of whispers and waiting. Tension. What would happen now? Would the jury's open hostility spill over into the classrooms? How would Stargirl react? Answers were expected on the following day, Valentine's Day.

On previous holidays-Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Groundhog Day-Stargirl had left a little something on each desk in her homeroom.

Would she do likewise this time?

The answer was yes. Each member of Homeroom 17 found a candy heart on his or her desk that morning.

There was a basketball game that night; the biggest game of the year. The Electrons had breezed through the regular season undefeated, but now the second season was about to begin: the play-offs. First the districts, then the regionals, and finally the state tournament, they had never even made it to the districts, but now visions of championships danced in their heads. The Electrons champions of all Arizona! They would settle for nothing less.

First hurdle in our way was Sun Valley, champions of the Pima League. The game was played Valentine's night on a neutral court in Casa Grande. All of Mica, it seemed, emptied out and headed for the game. Kevin and Nick went in the pickup.

From the moment the Mica mob entered the gym, our cheers rattled the rafters. The big green M on Stargirl's white sweater flounced as she spun and leaped with the other cheerleaders. Nick spent as much time watching her as he did watching the game. She cheered when they scored. When Sun Valley scored, she did not.

Something inside Nick felt better.

But not for long. They were losing. For the first time all year, they were trailing at the end of the first quarter. In fact, they were getting smoked, 21 to 9. The reason was no mystery. While Sun Valley's team was not as good as ours, they did have one thing we did not: a superstar. A kid named Ron Kovac. He stood six-foot-eight and averaged thirty points per game. Their players looked like five Davids flailing against Goliath.

Sun Valley's lead had increased to nineteen point's midway through the second quarter. Our once-raucous fans were stunned into silence, and that's when it happened. The ball was loose in the middle of the floor. Several players from each team dived for it. At that moment Kovac was running past, trying to avoid the divers, and his right foot came down on a prone player's sneaker-so it was told in the newspapers the next day. At the time, it happened so fast no one saw it, though several people said they heard a sickening crack, like a twig snapping. All they knew was that suddenly Goliath was on the floor writhing and screaming, and his right foot looked all wrong, and the Sun Valley coaches and trainer and players were sprinting across the floor. But they were not the first. Stargirl, somehow, was already there.

While Kovac's own cheerleaders sat gaping and stricken on their bench, Stargirl knelt on the hardwood floor. She held his head in her lap while the others attended his broken leg. Her hands moved over his face and forehead. She seemed to be saying things to him. When they carried him away on a stretcher, she followed. Everyone-both sides stood and applauded. The Sun Valley cheerleaders leaped as if he had just scored two points. Ambulance lights flashed in the high windows. Nick knew why he was applauding, but he wondered about some of the other Mica fans. Were they really standing in tribute, or because they were happy to see him go?

The game resumed. Stargirl returned to the cheerleaders' bench.

Without Kovac, Sun Valley was a pushover. By early in the second half we took the lead and went on to win easily.

Two nights later they lost to Glendale. Again they fell farther and farther behind as the first half went on. But this time there was no turnaround in the second half. This time the Electrons faced not one but five players better than themselves. This time no opponent broke an ankle, though Nick was sure in their desperation some of them secretly wished for it. They were shocked. They couldn't believe it. And then, as the seconds of the fourth quarter ticked by, they did. The cheers from across the gym were like volleys of arrows piercing their grand delusion. How could they have been so stupid? Did they really think that little Mica, undefeated in its own third-rate league, could ever stand up to the big city powerhouses around the state? They had been lured into great, foolish expectations. Suckered. They were devastated. It had been so wonderful to be winners. And so right for them. Winning, they had come to believe, was their destiny.

And now…

As the Glendale coach sent in the scrubs to mop them up, Mica girls wept. Boys cursed and booed. Some blamed the officials. Or the nets. Or the lights. The cheerleaders, to their credit, kept on cheering. They looked up at them with glistening eyes and mascara tracks on their cheeks. They pumped their arms and shouted and did everything that cheerleaders are supposed to do, but their gestures were empty, their hearts not in it.

Except for Stargirl. As Nick watched her intently, he could see that she was different. Her cheeks were dry. There was no crack in her voice, no sag in her shoulders. From the start of the second half on, she never sat down. And she never again looked at the game. She turned her back on the court. She stood and faced them and gave not an ounce of herself to the jubilation across the gym. They were losing by thirty points with a minute to go, but she cheered on as if we had a chance. Her eyes blazed with a ferocity Nick had never seen before. She shook her fists at them. She flung her defiance at our gloom.

And then her face was bloody.

A Glendale player had just dunked the ball and Joe pounded Nick's knee with his fist and Nick looked to see Stargirl's face suddenly a bloody mask and he was on my feet screaming, "NOOOOO!"

But it wasn't blood. It was a tomato. Someone had splattered her face with a perfectly thrown ripe tomato, and as the clock expired and the Glendale fans poured onto the court, Stargirl just stood there, her great eyes staring up at us in utter bewilderment through the pulpy red gore. Spouts of bitter laughter erupted among them, even some applause.

* * *

The next morning at home Nick found the card, it was in a school notebook that apparently had not opened for several days. It was a valentine, one of those little cut-out third-grade sorts, showing a blushing little boy and a girl with mary jane shoes and a big red heart between them and the words "I LOVE YOU." And as third-graders-and high-schoolers-often do, the sender had signed it in code.

**http :/ / .com/images/2980368/tumblr_l5avdbibRC1qblg7bo1_500_?1278985735**

"She gave everybody in school a card" That was his first thought. When Nick saw Joe at school, he was about to ask him, but he pulled back. He waited until lunch, trying to be casual. Nick slipped it in with the only thing that mattered that day. The school was in mourning. The game. The loss. The tomato. Oh yeah, incidentally, speaking of Stargirl: "Did you happen to get a card?"

He looked at me funny. "She gave them to her homeroom, I heard."

"Yeah," Nick said, "that's what I heard, too. But was that all? Didn't she give them to everybody else?"

He shrugged. "Not to me. Why? You get one?"

He was looking away across the lunchroom, biting into his sandwich, yet Nick felt he was grilling him. Shaking his head, he answered. "Oh no, just wondering."

Actually, the card was in the back pocket of his jeans. Meanwhile, all eyes in the lunchroom were on Stargirl. Nick thought they half expected to see traces of red still clinging to her face. She sat at her usual table with Demi Monroe and several other friends. She seemed subdued. She did not play her ukulele. She did not play with her rat. She just ate and talked with the girls at her table.

As the lunch period was ending, she got up but did not head straight for the exit. Instead she detoured in the direction of Nick's table. Nick panicked. He jumped up, grabbed his stuff, blurted "Gotta go," leaving Joe with his mouth hanging, and took off. Not fast enough. Halfway to the door he heard her behind me: "Hi, Nick." My face got warm. Nick was sure that every eye was turned to him, that they could all see the card in his pocket. He pretended to look at the clock, pretended he was late for something. He ran from the lunchroom.

Nick lurked in the shadows for the rest of the day. He went straight home after school and stayed in his room. He came out only for dinner. He told his parents he had a project to do. But he paced. He laid on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He stared out the window. He laid the card on his study desk. He picked it up. He read it. He read it. He read it. He played "Hi, Nick" over and over in his head. He tossed darts at the corkboard on the back of his door. My father called in, "What's your project, darts?" Nick went out. He drove around in the pickup. He drove down her street. At the last intersection before her house, He turned off.

For hours he lay under his sheet of moonlight. Her voice came through the night, from the light, from the stars.

Hi, Nick.

In the morning, it was a Saturday and Joe and Nick went together to Archie's for the weekly meeting of the Loyal Order of the Stone Bone. There were about fifteen of them. They wore their fossil necklaces. Archie wanted to discuss the Eocene skull he was holding, but all the others could talk about was the game. When they told Archie about the tomato, his eyebrows went up, but other than that, his face did not change. Nick thought. This is not news to him, he already knows.

Archie spent the whole session that way, nodding and smiling and raising his eyebrows. They dumped their disappointment on him, the devastation of the loss. He said very little. When it was over, he looked down at the skull in his lap and patted it and said, "Well, this fellow here lost his game, too. He was winning for ten million years or so, but then the early grasses started growing up around him, and he found himself in a different league. He hung in there as well as he could. He scored his points, but he kept falling farther and farther behind. The opposition was better, quicker, and keener. In the championship game, our boy got annihilated. Not only didn't he show up for class the next day, he never showed up, period. They never saw him again."

Archie lifted the snouted, fox-size skull until it was side by side with his own face. A good minute passed as he said nothing, inviting them into their own thoughts. Faces staring at faces staring at faces. Tens of millions of years of faces in a living room in a place called Arizona.

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**Spoiler - Next part, Nick finally has a conversation with her.**


	10. Do you think I'm cute?

**Here it is people.**

* * *

Monday. Lunch.

This time Nick stayed put when Stargirl came toward their table on her way out. His back was to her, he could see Joe's eyes following her, widening as she came closer. And then his eyes stopped, and his mouth was sliding toward a wicked grin, and it seemed like everything stopped but the clink of pans in the kitchen, and the back of his neck was on fire.

"You're welcome," Nick heard her say, almost sing.

He thought, What? But then he knew what. And he knew what he had to do. He knew he had to turn around and speak to her, and he knew she was going to stand there until he did. This was silly, this was childish, this being terrified of her. What was he afraid of, anyway?

He turned already feeling heavy, as if he were moving through water, as if he were confronting much more than a tenth-grade girl with an unusual name. He faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag-it looked hand-painted and at last his mocha eyes fell into her oceanic eyes. He said, "Thanks for the card."

Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off.

Joe was grinning, wagging his head. "She's in love."

"Bull," Nick said.

"She is mucho in love."

"She's goofy, that's all."

The bell rang. They gathered their stuff and left.

He wobbled through the rest of the day. A baseball bat could not have hit him harder than that smile did. He was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at him?

So why did this one feel like the first?

After school, his feet carried him toward her homeroom. He was trembling, his stomach had flies. He had no idea what he was going to do if he saw her. He only knew he couldn't not go.

She wasn't there. He hurried through the hallways. He ran outside. The buses were loading. Cars were revving. Hundreds of kids were scattering. For months she had been everywhere, now she was nowhere.

Nick heard her name. Her name. The same two syllables, the same eight letters that I had been hearing all year, and suddenly the sound struck my ear with a ping of pure silver. He drifted sideways to overhear. A group of girls was chattering toward a bus.

"When?"

"Today. After school. Just now!"

"I don't believe it!"

"I don't believe it took so long."

"Kicked off? Are they allowed?"

"Sure. Why not? It's not her school."

"I would've kicked her off long ago. It was treason."

"Good riddance."

I knew what they were talking about. It had been rumoured for days.

Stargirl had been kicked off the cheerleading squad.

"Hi, Nick!"

A chorus of girl voices calling his name. He turned, shading his eyes because they were stood behind the sun. They sang in unison "Starboy!" and started laughing. He waved and hurried home. He could never have admitted it, but he was thrilled.

Her house was two miles from mine, behind a little ten-store shopping centre. Archie had told him where. He walked there, he didn't want to ride, he wanted to be slow about it. He wanted to feel myself getting closer step by step, feel the tension rising like fizz in a soda bottle.

He did not know what he would do if he saw her. He knew only that he was nervous, afraid. He was more comfortable with her as history than as person. Suddenly, intensely, he wanted to know everything about her. He wanted to see her baby pictures. He wanted to watch her eating breakfast, wrapping a gift, sleeping. Since September she had been a performer-unique and outrageous-on the high school stage. She was the opposite of cool; she held nothing back. From her decorated desk to her oratorical speech to her performance on the football field, she was there for all to see. And yet now Nick felt he had not been paying attention. He felt he had missed something, something important.

She lived on Palo Verde. For a person so different, her house was surprisingly ordinary, at least by Arizona standards. Single story. Pale adobe. Clay-red pipe tile roof. Not a blade of grass in the small front yard, but rather barrel and prickly pear cacti and clusters of stones. It was dark, as Nick had intended, when he got there. He walked up and down the other side of the street. It occurred to him, he might be mistaken for a prowler, so he walked around the block. Nick stopped into Roma Delite for a slice of pizza. Gulped down only half of it, hurried back out, and couldn't relax when her house was not in sight. Couldn't relax when it was.

At first it was enough just to see the house. Then he began to wonder if she was inside. Nick wondered what she could be doing. Light came from every window he could see. There was a car in the driveway. The longer he hung around, the closer he wanted to be. He crossed the street and practically dashed past the house. As he went by, he scooped up a stone from the yard. He went up the street, turned, and looked at her house in the distance.

Nick whispered to the salt-sprinkled sky, "That's where Stargirl Ray lives. She likes me."

Nick headed back toward the house. The street, the sidewalks were deserted. The stone was warm in his hand. This time he walked slowly as he approached. He felt strange. My eyes fixed on a triangle of light in a curtained window. He saw a shadow on a yellow wall. Nick seemed to be drifting, footless, into the light.

Suddenly the front door opened. Nick dived behind the car in the driveway and crouched by the rear fender. He heard the door close, following footsteps. The steps matched the movement of a long shadow cast down the driveway. His breath stopped. The shadow stopped. He felt both ridiculous and weirdly, perfectly placed, as if crouching by that car was precisely what life had in store for him at that moment.

Her voice came from beyond the shadow. "Remember when you followed me into the desert that day after school?"

Absurdly, Nick debated whether to answer, as if doing so would-what? Give him away? Nick leaned into the smooth metal of the fender. It never occurred to him to stand, to show himself. Hours seemed to pass before Nick finally croaked, "Yes."

"Why did you turn around and go back?"

Her tone was casual, as if she held conversations every night with people crouching behind the car in the driveway.

"I don't remember," Nick said.

"Were you afraid?"

"No," He lied.

"I wouldn't have let you get lost, you know."

"I know."

A little shadow detached itself from the larger one. It came toward him, wavering over the pebbled driveway. It had a tail. It wasn't a shadow. It was the rat, Cinnamon. Cinnamon stopped at the tip of one of his sneakers. He stood, looking up at Nick. He put his front paws on top of his sneaker and nosed into the laces.

"Are you getting acquainted with Cinnamon?"

"Sort of."

"Are you lying?"

"Sort of."

"Are you afraid of rats?"

"Sort of."

"Do you think I'm cute? If you say sort of, I'll tell Cinnamon to bite you."

"Yes."

"Yes, what?"

"I think you're cute." Nick thought of adding "sort of" just to be funny, but he didn't.

"Do you think Cinnamon is cute?"

The rat had climbed fully onto his sneaker now. Nick could feel his weight. He wanted to shake him off. His tail spilled onto the driveway.

"No comment," Nick said.

"Oh my, hear that, Cinnamon? No comment. He doesn't want people to know he thinks you're cute."

"I think you're getting a little carried away," He said.

"I certainly hope so," she said. "Nothing's more fun than being carried away. Would you like to carry Cinnamon away for the night? He loves sleep-overs."

"No thank you."

"Oh." Her voice was mock-pouty. "Are you sure? He's no trouble. He hardly takes up any room. All you have to feed him is a Mini Wheat. Or two grapes. And he won't poop on your rug. Will you, Cinnamon? Go ahead, stand up and tell him you won't. Stand up, Cinnamon."

Cinnamon stood on his sneaker. His eyes shone like black pearls.

"Doesn't he have the cutest ears?"

Who notices a rat's ears? Nick looked. She was right. "Yeah," He said, "I guess he does."

"Tickle him behind his ears. He loves that."

Nick swallowed hard. He reached down with the tips of his two forefingers and tickled the tiny, furry spaces behind the rat's ears. He guessed he enjoyed it. He didn't move. And then, surprising him, Nick moved one fingertip in front of his nose, and he licked him. It had never occurred to Nick that rats do that. His tongue was half the size of his little fingernail. He would have guessed it was rough, like a cat's, but it wasn't; it was smooth.

And then he was no longer on Nick's foot-he was on his shoulder, making Nick yelp. He tried to swat him off, but he dug into his shirt with his fingernails. Meanwhile, Stargirl was cracking up. Nick could see the shadow shaking.

"Let me guess," she said. "Cinnamon jumped onto your shoulder."

"You got it," Nick said.

"And you're thinking about how rats are supposed to go for people's throats."

"I wasn't," Nick said, "but now that you mention it…" Nick clamped his hands around his neck. He felt something in his ear. Whiskery. Nick yelped again. "He's eating my ear!"

Stargirl laughed some more. "He's nuzzling you. He likes you. Especially your ears. He never meets an ear he doesn't love. By the time he's done, that ear of yours will be clean as a whistle. Especially if there's some leftover peanut butter in it."

Nick could feel the tiny tongue mopping the crevices of his left ear. "It tickles!" I felt something else. "I feel teeth!"

"He's just scraping something off for you. You must have something crusty in there. Have you washed your ears lately?"

"None of your business."

"Sorry. Didn't mean to get personal."

"I forgive you."

All was quiet for a while, except for the snuffing in his ear. Nick could hear the rat breathing. His tail drooped into his front shirt pocket.

"Do you want to confess now?"

"Confess what?" Nick said.

"That you're actually starting to like having a rodent poking around in your ear."

Nick smiled and nodded, dislodging the rat's nose for a moment. "I confess."

More silence, tiny breathing in his ear.

"Well," she said at last, "we have to go in now. Say good night, Cinnamon."

No, I thought, don't go.

"I still have another ear," Nick said.

"If he does that one, he'll never want to leave you, and I'll be jealous. Come on, Cinnamon. Time for beddy bye."

Cinnamon went on snuffing.

"He's not coming, is he?"

"Nope."

"Then just take hold of him and put him on the ground."

Nick did so. As soon as Nick put the rat down, he scooted under the tailpipe and out of sight on the other side of the car.

The shadow withdrew. He heard the front door open. Light gushed out "Night, Nick."

"Night," He called.

Nick didn't want to leave; he wished he could curl up right there on the driveway and go to sleep. He had been crouching for a long time. It was a chore just to stand. He was halfway home before he could walk right.

* * *

**Awwwwwwww :3**

**They are soo cute...**

**Not getting much reviews so, if I get over 5 reviews I'll update!**

**Thankyou :) xo**


	11. I'm erased, I'm gone, I'm nothing

Just two weeks before, Nick had found out that she knew his name, and now he was loopy with love. Nick was floating. He floated up the white light that washed his sheets and slept on the moon. In school, Nick was a yellow balloon, smiling and lazy, floating above the classrooms. He felt a faint tug on his string. Far below, Joe was calling, "You're in love, dude!" Nick merely smiled and rolled over and drifted dreamily out a window.

This state lasted until lunch, when suddenly Nick became self-conscious. He was certain that everyone in school knew. They would be waiting for him, turning as Nick entered the lunchroom, staring. Nick was uncomfortable in the spotlight, always had been. He was happy to stay behind the camera and let Joe take the bows out front.

So Nick hid for those thirty-five minutes in the gym equipment room. He sat atop a rolled-up wrestling mat, kicking a volleyball against the opposite wall. He had nothing to eat-he had intended to buy-but he wasn't hungry.

After school they found each other, not that they had to look.

She took Cinnamon from her bag and put him on her shoulder. "Shake paws with Nick, Cinnamon."

Cinnamon and Nick shook paws.

"Do you believe in enchanted places?" she said.

"You talking to me or the rat?"

She smiled. She dazzled. "You."

"I don't know," Nick said. "I never thought about it."

"I'm going to show you one."

"What if I don't want to see it?"

"You think you have a choice?"

She grabbed his hand and almost pulled him off his feet, laughing out loud, and they flew across the school fields, swinging hands for all the world to see.

They walked for miles, out past the business park, MicaTronics, the golf course, into the desert. "Look familiar?" she said.

By now, Cinnamon was riding Nick's shoulder. And he was carrying the ukulele, strumming nonsense. "It's where we came that day," Nick said.

She gave a snort. "We? I was coming out here, you were half a mile behind." She poked his shoulder. "Sneaking after me." She poked Nick again, hard this time, but her eyes were twinkling. "Stalking me."

Nick acted horrified, hurt. "Stalking? I was not stalking. I was just lagging behind a little, that's all."

"Following me."

He shrugged. "So?"

"Why?"

Nick could feel a million reasons, but there were no words to express them. "I don't know."

"You liked me."

Nick smiled.

"You were smitten with me. You were speechless to behold my beauty. You had never met anyone so fascinating. You thought of me every waking minute. You dreamed about me. You couldn't stand it. You couldn't let such wonderfulness out of your sight. You had to follow me."

Nick turned to Cinnamon. He licked his nose. "Don't give yourself so much credit. It was your rat I was after."

She laughed, and the desert sang.

To the person who expects every desert to be barren sand dunes, the Sonoran must come as a surprise. Not only are there no dunes, there's no sand. At least not the sort of sand you find at the beach. The ground does have a sandy color to it, or gray, but your feet won't sink in. It's hard, as if it's been tamped. And pebbly. And glinting with-what elsemica.

But you don't notice the ground much. What you notice are the saguaros. To the newcomer from the East, it's as simple as that. The desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil's fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo.

Nick and Stargirl walked a weaving line around the plant life, up and down washes and gullies, the Maricopas looming lavender in the distance.

"When you turned and ran that day," she said, "I called after you."

"You did?"

"I whispered."

"Whispered? How'd you expect me to hear?"

"I don't know," she said. "I just thought you would."

Nick strummed the ukleule. He squared his shoulders. Giving a rat a ride improves the posture.

"You're shy, aren't you?" she said.

"What makes you think that?"

She laughed. "Were you embarrassed when I pulled you along after school today? All those kids looking?"

"Nah."

"Are you lying?"

"Yeah."

She laughed. Nick seemed to be good at making her laugh.

Nick glanced back. The highway was out of sight. "Do you have the time?" He asked.

"Nobody has the time," she said. "The time cannot be owned." She threw out her arms and twirled till her multicoloured skirt looked like a pinwheel taffy. "The time is free to everyone!"

"Sorry I asked," Nick said.

She hung her sunflower bag on a cactus arm and cartwheeled toward the Maricopas. Crazily, Nick felt like joining her. But told himself he couldn't because he was loaded down with a ukulele and a rat. He picked up her bag and followed.

When she decided to walk like a normal human again, when Nick told her she was goofy.

She stopped, turned to him, and bowed grandly. "Thank you, good sir."

Then she took his arm as if they were strolling down a promenade and she said, "Scream, Nick."

"Huh?"

"Just throw your head back and let it all out. Scream your ears off. Nobody will hear you."

"Why would I want to do that?"

She turned her astonished eyes on Nick. "Why wouldn't you?"

Nick pointed to Cinnamon. "If he screams first, then I will." And Nick changed the subject. "Are we ever going to get to this enchanted place?" Nick felt silly just saying the words.

"Just a little farther," she said.

Nick humoured her. "So how do you know an enchanted place when you come to it?"

"You'll see," she said. She squeezed his hand. "Did you know there's a country with officially designated 'enchanted places'?"

"No," Nick said. "Where would that be? Oz?"

"Iceland."

"Imagine that."

"I'm ignoring your sarcasm. I think it would be neat if we had that here. You'd be walking or riding along, and there would be this stone marker with a brass plate: 'Enchanted Site. U.S. Department of Interior.'"

"We'd litter it up," Nick said.

She stared at him, her smile gone. "Would we?"

Nick felt bad, as if he had ruined something. "Not really," He told her. "Not if there's a Don't Be a Litterbug sign."

A minute later she stopped. "We're here."

Nick looked around. The place couldn't have been more ordinary. The only notable presence was a tall, dilapidated saguaro, a bundle of sticks, in worse shape than Archie's Senor. The rest was gray scrub and tumbleweed and a few prickly pears. "I thought it might look different," Nick said.

"Special? Scenic?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"It's a different kind of scenery," she said. "Shoes off."

They pulled off their shoes.

"Sit."

They sat, legs crossed. Cinnamon scampered down Nick's arm and onto the ground.

Stargirl shrieked, "Stop!" She scooped up the rat and put him in her bag. "Owls, hawks, snakes. He'd be a tasty meal."

"So," Nick said, "when does the enchantment start?"

They were sitting side by side, facing the mountains.

"It started when the earth was born." Her eyes were closed. Her face was golden in the setting sun. "It never stops. It is, always. It's just here."

"So what do we do?"

She smiled. "That's the secret." Her cupped hands rested in her lap.

"We do nothing. Or as close to nothing as we can." Her face turned slowly to him, though her eyes remained closed. "Have you ever done nothing?"

Nick laughed. "My mother thinks I do it all the time."

"Don't tell her I said so, but your mother is wrong." She turned back to the sun. "It's really hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here, like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There's a whole commotion going on inside us."

"That's bad?" Nick said.

"It's bad if we want to know what's going on outside ourselves."

"Don't we have eyes and ears for that?"

She nodded. "They're okay most of the time. But sometimes they just get in the way. The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then-maybe-the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper."

The sun was glowing orange now, clipping the mountains' purple crests.

"So how do I become this nothing?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "There's no one answer to that. You have to find your own way. Sometimes I try to erase myself. I imagine a big pink soft soap eraser, and it's going back and forth, back and forth, and it starts down at my toes, back and forth, back and forth, and there they go-poof!-my toes are gone. And then my feet. And then my ankles. But that's the easy part. The hard part is erasing my senses-my eyes, my ears, my nose, my tongue. And last to go is my brain. My thoughts, memories, all the voices inside my head. That's the hardest, erasing my thoughts." She chuckled faintly. "My pumpkin. And then, if I've done a good job, I'm erased. I'm gone. I'm nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl."

"And?" Nick said.

"And…I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I'm not outside my world anymore, and I'm not really inside it either. The thing is, there's no difference anymore between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain." She smiled dreamily. "I like that most of all, being rain."

"Am I the first one you've brought out here?"

She didn't answer. She faced the mountains, bathed in sun syrup, her face as still and peaceful as I've ever seen a face.

"Stargirl-"

"Shhhh."

That was the last sound either of them made for a long time. They sat side by side, lotus style, facing west. Nick closed his eyes. He tried to be perfectly still-and promptly found out that she was right. He could immobilize his arms and legs, but inside him it was rush hour in downtown Phoenix. Nick had never been so aware of his breath and his heartbeat, not to mention other assorted grumblings and gurglings. And his head-it just wouldn't close down. Every question, every stray thought from miles around came wandering into his brain, sniffing about, scratching at his attention.

But Nick tried. He tried the eraser, but it wouldn't even wipe out the first toe. He tried to imagine he was sawdust blowing away with the wind. Swallowed by a whale. Dissolving away like Alka-Seltzer. Nothing worked. Nick could not make himself disappear.

Nick peeked. He knew he wasn't supposed to, but he did. Clearly, she had erased herself. She was gone. She was serenity. Her lips faintly smiling. Her golden skin. The glowing thread-ends of her hair. She seemed to have been dipped in sunlight and set here to dry. Nick felt a pang of jealousy, that she could be sitting next to him and not know it. That she could be somewhere most wonderful and he could not be there, too.

Then he saw the rat. He had crawled out of the bag. He was sitting on it much as them were, his front paws-Nick kept thinking of them as tiny hands, they were so human-like-dangling before him. He, too, was not moving. He, too, was facing the sunset, his pelt the color of a new penny. His peppercorn eyes were fully open.

Nick knew it must have been a trick she had taught him, or imitative rodent behavior. Still, he couldn't help thinking there was more to it, that the whiskered little fellow was having an experience of his own-which might include digestion in a critter's stomach if Stargirl's fears came true. As quietly as possible, Nick reached over and scooped him up. He held him in both hands. He did not struggle or squirm, but resumed facing the sunset with his tiny chin resting on his forefinger. In his fingertips Nick could feel his heartbeat. He drew him closer to his chest. Nick dared any varmint to come near.

Nick took a deep breath and closed his eyes for another try at enchantment. Nick didn't think he succeeded. He thought Cinnamon was a better eraser than he was. Nick tried. Nick tried so hard he almost squeaked, but he could not seem to leave myself, and the cosmos did not visit me. Nick could not stop wondering what time it was.

But something did happen. A small thing. Nick was aware of stepping over a line, of taking one step into territory new to him. It was a territory of peace, of silence. He had never experienced such utter silence before, such stillness. The commotion within him went on, but at a lower volume, as if someone had turned down his dial. And an eerie thing happened. While he never did totally lose awareness of himself, Nick believe he did, so to speak, lose Cinnamon. He no longer felt his pulse, his presence, in him hands. It seemed they were no longer separate, but were one.

When the sun fell behind the mountains, Nick felt it as a faint coolness on his face.

Nick didn't know how long his eyes were closed. When he opened them, she was gone. Alarmed, he jerked around. She was standing off a ways, smiling. Evening had come. While his eyes were closed, the mountains' dusky lavender had drifted over the desert.

They put on their shoes and they headed for the highway. Nick expected her to interrogate him, but she did not. One moment the moon was not there, and then it was, then one bright star. They walked across the desert hand in hand, saying nothing.

* * *

**I think this is absolutely cute!**

**I've got my drama exam today! I'm performing my play to the examiner o.o **

**Nervous like lol.**

**10 reviews for next one please =)**


	12. Why can't she be…

**OH LOOK ITS ANOTHER CHAPTER HAHA**

**Sorry about that, I think I just got bored with this story but someone commented on my other story asking about this so I thought might aswell carry on, not much left of it anyway :)**

**so here it is enjoy!**

* * *

They were alone as they were the only ones in school.

At least that's how it seemed in the following days.

As Nick went about his day, he felt her going about hers. He sensed her movement, her presence in distant parts of the building. When he was walking the halls between classes, he didn't have to see her, Nick knew she was there: unseen in the mob heading his way, about to turn a corner five classroom doors down. Nick homed in on the beacon of her smile. As they approached each other, the noise and the students around them melted away and they were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other's eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.

And then one day Nick began to discover that they were more alone than he had dreamed.

It was Thursday. Normally on that day, after third period, Stargirl and Nick would pass each other on the second floor around the teachers' lounge. They would smile and say hi and continue on their way to their separate classes. On this day, impulsively, Nick fell in alongside her.

"How about an escort?" Nick said.

She grinned slyly. "Anybody in mind?"

They touched little fingers and walked on. Her next class was on the first floor, so they went down the nearest stairway. They were walking side by side. That's when Nick noticed.

No one spoke to them.

No one nodded to them.

No one smiled at them.

No one looked at them.

A crowded stairway, and no shoulder, no sleeve brushed them. Students climbing the steps veered to the railing or wall. Except for Stargirl jabbering in his ear, the usual raucous chatter was absent.

Mostly what Nick noticed were the eyes. Faces turned up from the steps below, but the eyes never connected with them. They went right on through them as if they were gamma rays. Or they nipped their ears and rattled off among the walls and other eyes. Nick had an urge to look down at himself, to make sure he was there.

At lunch Nick said to Joe, "Nobody looks at me."

He was staring at his sandwich.

"Joe!" Nick snapped. "Now you're doing it."

He came up laughing. He looked Nick square in the eyes. "Sorry."

Usually there were others at the table. Today there was only Joe and Nick. Nick leaned across my lunch. "Joe, what's going on?"

He looked off, then back to Nick. "I was wondering when you'd notice. Kinda hoping you wouldn't."

"Notice what?"

He stalled by taking a bite of tuna salad sandwich. He took his time chewing. He drank orangeade from a straw. "First of all, it's not you."

Nick pulled back and held out his hands. "It's not me. What's that supposed to mean?"

"It's who you're with."

Nick sat there, blinking, staring at him. "Stargirl?"

He nodded.

"Okay," Nick said. "So?"

He stared at him some more, chewed, swallowed, sipped, looked away, looked back. "They're not talking to her."

The words didn't stick. "What do you mean? Who's 'they'?"

He cocked his head at the sea of tables and eaters. "Them."

"Who them?" Nick said, too unhinged to laugh at his grammar.

He wet his lips. "All of them." He shrugged. "Well, almost." His eyes drifted over Nick's shoulder. "There're still two girls sitting with her."

Nick glanced back. At the height of Stargirl's popularity, kids had been pulling chairs from other tables to squeeze around hers. Now it was just Stargirl, Demi Munroe, and a ninth-grader.

"So," Nick said, "exactly what is going on?"

He sipped from his straw. "The silent treatment is going on. Nobody's talking to her."

It still wasn't stinking in. "What do you mean, 'nobody's talking to her'? What, did everybody have a meeting in the gym and vote on it?"

"It wasn't that official. It just happened. Got up steam."

Nick gaped at him. "When? When did it start? How? Why?" He was beginning to screech.

"I don't know exactly. After the basketball stuff, I guess. That really ticked off a lot of people."

"The basketball stuff."

He nodded.

"The basketball stuff," Nick repeated dumbly.

He put down his sandwich. "Nick, don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. Cheering for the other team? What did you think, people thought that was cute?"

"It was her, Joe. It was harmless. Weird maybe, but harmless. It was her."

He nodded slowly. "Yeah, well, I guess that's what I'm saying. It's not just one thing she did. It's everything. Don't tell me you never noticed. Remember a certain tomato?"

"Joe, a couple of months ago everybody stood and cheered in the auditorium when she won the oratorical contest."

"Hey"-he gestured defensively-"tell them."

"One person threw the tomato. One."

Joe snickered. "Yeah, and a thousand wanted to. Did you notice the cheers when it happened? People blame her. For the team losing. For our undefeated season going down the toilet."

Nick wasn't sure if Joe was still talking about "them."

"Joe-" Nick felt himself pleading. "She was only a cheerleader."

"Nick"-he was pointing-"you asked me what was going on, I told you." He stood up and took his tray to the belt.

Nick stared at his empty chair until he returned.

"Joe…the Happy Birthday songs, the Valentine cards, all the nice things she does for people…doesn't that count for something?"

The bell rang.

He got up, gathering his books and shrugged. "I guess not."

For the rest of the day, and the day after and the day after that, Nick grew increasingly paranoid. When he was walking with her in and around the school, Nick was intensely aware that the nature of their aloneness had changed. It was no longer a cozy, tunnel-of-love sweetness, but a chilling isolation. They never had to veer, never had to make way for someone else; everyone made way for them. Hallway crowds fell away from them. Except for Selena Russo. Whenever they passed her, she tilted toward them with a gloating smirk on her face.

As for Stargirl, she didn't seem to notice. She jabbered constantly in his ear while Nick smiled and nodded to her, frost formed on the back of his neck.

* * *

"The Amish in Pennsylvania have a word for it."

"What's that?" Nick said.

"Shunning."

Nick was at Archie's. He had to talk to someone.

"Well, that's what's happening."

"The shunnee, so to speak, has gotten himself in dutch with the church, so he's excommunicated. The whole community is in on it. Unless he repents, nobody speaks to him for the rest of his life. Not even his family."

"What?"

"That's right. Not even his family."

"What about his wife?"

"Wife. Kids. Everybody." His pipe had gone out. He relit it with a stick match. "I believe the idea is to drive him away. But some stay, continue working the farm, having dinner. If he passes the salt to his wife, she ignores it. If the bishop had his way, the pigs and chickens would ignore him. It's as if he doesn't exist."

Nick nodded. "I know the feeling."

They were on the back porch and Nick stared out at Senor Saguaro.

Archie said, "Does it happen to you when you're not with her?"

"No," Nick said. "At least I don't think so. But when I'm with her, I feel like it's aimed at me, too."

A small pipe cloud left the corner of his mouth. He smiled sadly. "Poor dolphin. Caught in a tuna net."

Nick picked up Barney, the Paleocene rodent skull, he wondered if someone would be holding Cinnamon's head 60 million years from now. "So, what should I do?"

Archie waved his hand. "Oh, well, that's the easy part. Stay away from her: your problem's kaput."

Nick sneered. "Great advice. You know it's not that easy."

He did know, of course, but he wanted Nick to say it. Nick told him about the valentine, the night in her driveway, and the walk in the desert. The question that came to mind then sounded silly, but it persisted: "Do you believe in enchanted places?"

He took the pipe from his mouth and looked straight at Nick.

"Absolutely."

Nick was confused. "But you're a scientist. A man of science."

"A man of bones. You can't be up to your eyeballs in bones and not

believe in enchanted places."

Nick looked at Barney and he ran his fingertip along the hard line of his two inch jaw, rough like a cat's tongue. Sixty million years in his hands. Nick looked at Archie. "Why can't she be…"

He finished for Nick. "…like everybody else?"

He stood up and stepped down from the porch onto the desert-for his back yard, except for the shed where he kept his digging tools, was the desert. Nature did the landscaping. Nick put down Barney and joined him.

They ambled toward Senor Saguaro.

"Not like everybody else," Nick said. "Not exactly. Not totally. But…Archie…" Nick stopped. Archie stopped then Nick turned full-face to him. His thoughts and feelings were a wild, conflicting jumble. After staring stupidly at him for a long time, Nick blurted, "She cheers for the other team!"

Archie pulled the pipe from his mouth, as if to better digest his words. He raised one finger in the air. He nodded solemnly. "Ahh, yes."

Nick and Archie resumed walking and walked on past the tool shed, past Senor Saguaro.

Occasionally Nick picked up a stone and flung it toward the purple Maricopa's. Archie said, almost in a whisper, "She's not easy to put into words, is she?"

Nick shook his head.

"An unusual girl," he said. "Could see that from the first. And her parents, as ordinary, in a nice way, as could be. How did this girl come to be? I used to ask myself. Sometimes I thought she should be teaching me. She seems to be in touch with something that the rest of us are missing." He looked at him. "Hm?"

Nick nodded.

He turned the mahogany bowl of his pipe upside down and rapped it with his knuckle. A small stream of ash spilled onto a thicket of dead mesquite.

He pointed the pipe stem at Nick. "You know, there's a place we all inhabit, but we don't much think about it, we're scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day."

"What's that?" Nick said.

"It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then…"

He pulled out his pouch and repacked his pipe. Cherryscent flew. He struck a match. The pipe bowl, like some predator, or seducer, drew down the flame. "…and then-ah-we open our eyes and the day is before us, and"-he snapped his fingers-"we become ourselves."

Like so many of Archie's words, they seemed not to enter through Nick ears but to settle on his skin, there to burrow like tiny eggs awaiting the rain of my maturity, when they would hatch and Nick, at last would understand.

They walked in silence. Yellow blooms had appeared on a cactus, and for some reason that made me incredibly sad. The purple of the mountains flowed lik watercolour.

"They hate her," Nick said.

He stopped then looked intently at Nick. He turned Nick around and they headed back. He put his arm around his shoulder. "Let's consult Senor Saguaro."

Shortly they were standing before the derelict giant. Nick never understood how the Senor managed to convey a sense of dignity, majesty even, considering his stick-rickety, see-through skeleton and the ridiculous, leathery crumple of hide about his foot, his fallen britches.

Archie always spoke to him with respectful formality, as to a judge or visiting dignitary.

"Good day, Senor Saguaro," he began. "I believe you know my friend and charter member of the Loyal Order of the Stone Bone, Mr. Borlock." He whispered an aside to Nick: "I'm a little rusty, but I think I'll use Spanish now. He prefers it on delicate matters." He turned back to the cactus. "Parece, Senor Borlock aqui; es la victima de un 'shunning' de sus companeros estudiantes en el liceo. El objeto principal del 'shunning' es la enamorada del Senor Borlock, nuestra propia Seborita Nina Estrella. El esta en busqueda de preguntas."

As Archie spoke, he looked up toward the elf owl hole. Now he turned back to Nick and whispered, "I asked for questions."

"Questions?" Nick whispered. "What about answers?"

But he was turning from Nick, tilting his head toward the great cactus, his finger on his lips-"Shh"-his eyes closed.

Nick waited.

At last he nodded and turned back to Nick. "The esteemed Senor says there is only one question."

"What's that?" Nick said.

"He says it all boils down to this-if I'm translating correctly: Whose affection do you value more, hers or the others'? The Senor says everything will follow from that."

Nick wasn't sure he understood the Senor any more than he understood Archie half the time, but Nick said nothing, and he went home. In bed that night, as the moonlight reached high tide under his chin, Nick realized that in fact understood the question perfectly.

Nick just didn't want to answer it.

* * *

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